The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! For a number of years now, I have been privileged to present here time and again on questions of world view from the point of view of spiritual science, as will also be the basis for tonight's reflections.

Now, the friends of our spiritual-scientific worldview here have essentially been of the opinion that such a lecture should also be given this year, in these difficult times of ours. And that may well not be inappropriate, because spiritual science, as it is meant here, is really connected with the deepest questions of the human heart, of human life, of the human soul, with all the questions that go to the bottom of the bitter disappointments of human life and the impulses that underlie the courageous, bold, sacrificial deeds of the time that bears so much in its womb and in which we are currently living.

Now, of course, spiritual science, as it is meant here, is not very appropriate in our time, nor is it in line with the thinking of the broadest circles. And anyone who is completely immersed in the subject of spiritual science, will not find it incomprehensible when one contradiction after another, one opposition after another, arises against what is said here from a spiritual-scientific point of view. It is also much more understandable to the representative of this spiritual science when general judgment and general opinion see something fantastic and dreamy in this spiritual science. Such judgments are first of all asserted by those who have had little contact with this spiritual science. This is easier to understand than if someone were to readily and wholeheartedly agree with such unfamiliar things. In particular, there are three points of view that are always asserted from the opponents of spiritual science.

First of all, it is said that what wants to present itself as spiritual science contradicts a world view that is based on the sensual foundations of scientific research in the present. The second objection, which must also be raised, is that this spiritual science, by its very nature, could easily lead to the dark sides of the human soul, to superstition, prejudices and the like. And a third point that is still being asserted is that the most valuable, the most esteemed human feelings and emotions, religious feelings, would somehow be affected by what spiritual science has to assert.

Now, esteemed attendees, I hope that from the suggestions I will allow myself to give this evening, it can be seen how these three objections to spiritual science, or, one could also say, to supersensible knowledge, can be defeated.

First, let us consider the relationship of spiritual science to natural science thinking, to a natural science-based world view in the present day. Again and again, I have emphasized here that true, non-dilettantish spiritual science will not in the least rebel against anything that is a proven result of the current natural science world view. On the contrary, spiritual science wants to be a continuation of what natural science is for the external, sensory and external-practical life, what natural science has achieved to such a high and admirable degree in recent centuries. In this way, spiritual science seeks to be a science in the same sense as natural science is a science for the external world. Therefore, this spiritual science must take a completely different path, must research in a completely different way than natural science has to do its task. And because, especially in the course of the last few centuries, namely the nineteenth century, until today, we have become accustomed to regarding only the way of approaching things that natural science does as truly scientific, it is quite natural that at present people do not yet want to accept as science something that on the one hand wants to be science but, as spiritual science, must be different from natural science.

Basically, it is the case that spiritual science only begins its research where natural science, where ordinary, everyday thinking, ends. And it is easiest to get an idea of what spiritual science wants to be and should be, how it wants to position itself in the overall cultural process of the time, by paying attention to how it differs from natural scientific research and everyday thinking. In the course of such scientific research and in ordinary thinking, we look at the objects of the sense world that are around us. We try to grasp the laws of the processes of this sense world with our brain-bound thinking. We try to bring coherence into the succession of phenomena. And in general, for ordinary thinking and also for ordinary science, we are quite content with the fact that we have acquired concepts, notions and ideas about what unfolds before our senses or what takes place in the course of historical development in humanity. When we have arrived at these conceptions, concepts and ideas, and when we can be convinced that they depict something of the external sensory reality, we have satisfied our need for this external knowledge.

But where ordinary science, this everyday thinking, has to stop, that is where spiritual science must begin its research. Spiritual science is not about conducting external experiments or applying any research methods based on things that can be externally surveyed by the senses, but about studying the most intimate processes of the soul, which, however, must first be evoked. The spiritual researcher has to do with a purely spiritual-soul work in a spiritual laboratory, as the chemist has to do with a sensory work in an outer laboratory and its processes. And just as the chemist allows people to see what he can extract from nature through his processes, so the spiritual researcher must be able to allow people to see into intimate soul processes, which, however, just as in the chemical laboratory the processes must be evoked through experiments, must first be evoked. This is what one must pay particular attention to. One does not arrive at the results of spiritual science through experiences of the soul that one already has in ordinary life or in ordinary science, but only by evoking soul-spiritual processes that do not exist at all in ordinary thinking, in ordinary imagining and feeling.

What the soul has to accomplish is usually referred to as meditation, as concentration of thought. And it will be my task to sketch out, at least with a few lines, the picture that should represent what the spiritual researcher has to do to find the way into the spiritual worlds. You can find everything in more detail in my books, in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”.

What it is about is that one treats the thought, the concept, the sensation, in short, the whole soul life of man in a different way than one is accustomed to treating it in everyday life and in ordinary science. Where everyday life stops, spiritual research must begin. It is not about having a thought for spiritual science, but about living inwardly, becoming completely one with a thought experience, with an intuitive perception. Therefore, it is not at all important, not so essential, to have a thought, an intuitive perception, that initially depicts something external. I would like to say that one experiences more intimately in spiritual research if one initially devotes oneself to such thought experiences that do not depict anything external. I would like to introduce an example of this, a simple example.

Let us assume that someone forms the idea: “In the light that spreads through space, wisdom spreads through the world.” This is certainly not a thought that any scientist or the external, material life will recognize. But the point is not to depict something that is real in the external, sensual sense, but to now fully immerse the thought in the soil of the soul life and to awaken the strength in the soul that must be awakened if such a thought is to be held entirely within the soul life through inner effort. One must distract one's attention from everything else one sees and hears in the world; from everything else one is reminded of in life; from all that one can experience as suffering and joy in life, especially feelings that arise from the passions, from the instinctual life; one must distract oneself from all this for the time in which one wants to immerse oneself completely in such a thought, which one places at the center of one's soul life through inner arbitrariness.

All these soul forces, which are otherwise used for the unfolding life of the soul, are drawn from the outer life, including the everyday inner life. For what matters is not that one has this thought on which one wants to concentrate, not what it contains, but the inner, spiritual-soul activity, the spiritual-soul work of becoming aware of what the soul is doing by fixing itself on a single thought. But such an exercise should not be done just once as something temporary or repeated a few times, and then one should not expect that some experiences will already occur. This exercise, depending on the personal disposition of the person, must be continued for years. For some people it takes less time, for some more. But patience and perseverance and inner energy must be applied so that the path of spiritual research can be entered in this way. Above all, the exercise of patience must consist of holding the same thought again and again – you will soon see why this must be so. What matters is not a change of thoughts, but this concentrated soul activity.

Now, when the soul is urged in this way to perform an arbitrary task that it does not otherwise use in the outer life, then one gradually notices that what the soul does becomes more and more independent of what it otherwise depends on very much, of the bodily, the external bodily. One must experience for oneself what arises from this togetherness, this very intimate togetherness with such a soul activity. And that is what seems so grotesque, even paradoxical, to the thinking habits of our time when one hears what can arise from such an inner effort of the soul life. Just as little as someone who has never heard of chemistry and has only seen water can imagine that hydrogen, which has completely different properties than water - water is liquid and extinguishes fire, hydrogen is a gas and burns itself - can be extracted from water, hydrogen is something different than water, but it is in water, and you only notice it when you have extracted it through chemical methods. To someone who has never seen this, who has never heard of chemistry, it will sound amazing that a substance that burns can be obtained from water.

In the same way, it will sound paradoxical and fantastic to someone who has never heard of spiritual experiences or such experiences in the soul when they are told that through the repeated exertion of the soul in the direction described, the spiritual-soul element is really released from the physical-bodily element , that the soul-spiritual becomes completely free and one can speak of the fact that the end of the path, the beginning of which, as already mentioned, has been characterized with a few strokes, is that one experiences: You are no longer in your body with your thinking, your brain, you are outside your body with it. Your body has become an object outside of yourself, as the objects of the sensory world are outside of the physical body.

This is a great and significant experience, to which the spiritual researcher ascends. To have really experienced once that one can be independent in one's spiritual and mental activities from the physical and bodily, is one of the most harrowing things one can go through in one's mental experience. And that must be emphasized: the methods of the spiritual researcher are not ones that leave one as indifferent as external scientific methods. Even if I have had to describe to you what may have seemed to you to be an abstract inner process, it is nevertheless connected with the whole of our soul life, if one really succeeds in intensifying one's entire soul life with what has been brought into the center of one's soul life through free will. Not just the thoughts, but the impulses of the emotions and the impulses of the will move up from the depths of the soul. One has the feeling that one's entire inner being is drawn along by what the thought, on which one has concentrated, has torn out of oneself. The beginning of the path is that one feels energized inwardly, so to speak, and rises to the one sensation, which is first felt fully: You break away from your physical body; you move into a completely different world, into which your physical body cannot move. I am not telling you something constructed, but the real experiences of the researcher.

At first, you have this experience of coming out of the physical body. But then this experience changes. If you keep making efforts in this direction, you will notice that instead of further intensifying this inner experience, you now feel how it becomes paralyzed, this inner life; how it becomes weaker and weaker. Up to a certain point it becomes stronger and stronger, but then it becomes weaker and weaker. So that one has the feeling: not an external-physical fainting, but a mental-spiritual fainting begins. One has the feeling that one would lose all one's spiritual experiences when one has left one's body, as if some unknown force were taking them away.

If I were to try to characterize what one experiences inwardly, I would have to resort to concepts and comparisons, but these imply more than usual comparisons, which may seem unfamiliar at first. Let us assume that a plant grows out of the ground, towards the leaves and flowers, and finally into the fruit. In this plant there is also the power that ultimately brings forth the germ. Let us assume that the germ could become conscious by growing the plant in this way. Let us assume that the germ would have to have the feeling: I am becoming more and more powerful, more and more able to create a new plant out of myself. But the germ knows that the old plant is dying. It knows: I take its strength; only by causing the leaves to fall and the flowers to wither can I flourish as a germ. All this must lose its meaning, then I can develop as a germ.

This is also how it is, my dear attendees, when you immerse yourself in the spiritual and soul realm in the way described, which has now become free of the body. One feels as if one is living into an element that is always at the bottom of the soul, but the whole of human life between birth and death has within it forces that actually destroy it; forces that gradually cause the human being to die, the human being as he is in physical life, leading him towards death. One cannot look at this process in the depths of the human soul without first having brought before the spiritual eye the reasons that exist in man as reasons for the death that will come over him in physical life.

Therefore, for those who have known something about this process over the centuries, the experience that is meant is such that they have said: One arrives at the gate of death; one makes oneself known when the soul and spirit separate from the body, that one is continually being pulled and paralyzed by the best that one has in everyday life, by that which is our innermost life asset in the physical body. This is hidden from us in the ordinary life. There we only enjoy the fruit. We notice that we can think and feel. The spiritual researcher has made the discovery that if he really lifts out of his body what underlies thinking and feeling, it is that which actually constantly consumes the body, which lives in man as the power of thought, as the power of feeling, as the power of will. In its real form, it is that which harbors the destructive forces of the body and which ultimately really concentrates itself into death.

You can understand that the wise guides of the world had good reason to draw a veil over these processes for ordinary life. But anyone who wants to research the truth must not be afraid of the true nature of that which works in the depths of the soul and is always present. That is why one speaks of a powerlessness that comes over one when one has gone the spiritual research way to a certain point in the inwardly concentrated soul life. And when one has done everything to continue on this path, then the forces intensify, then one finally comes to overcome this inner powerlessness and to live fully consciously in the spiritual-soul, but now separated from the physical-bodily, lives in the spiritual-soul. It must now be emphasized that just as the spiritual researcher is generally well aware of the contradictions between the scientific world view and what he has to assert, he is also well aware of what can be objected to in detail about what he has to present.

Thus, the spiritual researcher knows very well that the medically or scientifically educated person can say: Yes, we are well aware of what you are telling us, that when a person hypnotizes himself or suggests a certain idea, he enters a state in which he then lives in an abnormal consciousness, in a pathological state. But we also know that such a state cannot lead to anything healthy, to any true knowledge. What science and the scientifically educated can object to in this way is very well known to the spiritual researcher. But the person who raises such objections against spiritual science is not familiar with what spiritual research presents, so that the path known to the physician and the natural scientist is avoided. For that which the physician and the natural scientist know and characterize in the manner just discussed is precisely what the spiritual researcher avoids, because all this is still bound to the body in a certain way. The unconsciousness that has been mentioned, all the upsetting things that the soul goes through, are experienced purely in the spiritual and soul realm; the physical is not involved at all.

Those who are familiar with the methods of spiritual research will find that what spiritual research provides as its methods and what lies after the soul has been healed is the opposite of what physicians or natural scientists believe to be the basis of this concentration and meditation. For everything that is experienced there is not experienced in the same way as in a hypnotized state or suggestion, but is based precisely on the soul-spiritual becoming free from that which can be hypnotized or comes to suggestion. That which is put to sleep when someone is hypnotized, that which is switched off when someone is given suggestive ideas, is what is brought to life in spiritual research, and it is what is switched off in that which is affected as in an automaton, what the hypnotist or the suggestor does. In hypnosis and suggestion, what is awakened in spiritual research is to be lulled to sleep. I can only hint at all these things; you can read more about them in my books and in our literature in general.

If the spiritual researcher now continues on his path as described, he comes to a real experience of a spiritual-soul core. This spiritual-soul core could be compared to something external; one could compare it to the plant germ, which forms from the forces that gradually arise in the plant, forming beyond the leaves, the petals, and then becoming a new plant. In this way, spiritual science can speak of a spiritual-soul core in the human being. But here I must particularly draw attention to the fact that the whole process of spiritual research is a process of knowledge. What the spiritual researcher discovers is not brought about by developing the methods within himself. All the methods that he develops within himself in this way do not lead to anything new in the human soul, but only to a knowledge of what is already there in the human soul. We can say that the plant germ, which is discovered by the spiritual researcher, does not change in any of its properties when I look at it. Likewise, what lies at the bottom of the soul and is only covered up for everyday life does not change when the spiritual researcher applies his methods to his own soul. He only looks at what is at the bottom of the soul. So this spiritual-soul core is at the bottom of every human soul. The spiritual researcher only discovers that he carries this spiritual-soul core in his soul, like the plant germ that grows from one plant to another.

He knows that what goes through birth and death, what existed in a spiritual-soul world before birth, what has descended from the spiritual world, is not brought about by bodily-physical processes , but that it itself, by living in the body, works on the formation of the body; that it then, in turn, passes through the gate of death into a spiritual world, after it has been woven and worked between birth and death in the bodily life. This is the essence of spiritual science, that this spiritual-soul core of the human being is truly contemplated.

If we now continue our meditation and concentration on life, namely on the side of the will, and continue this intimate soul life, then we notice something else. However, it is necessary to treat the will just as intimately as one treats the thought in meditation and concentration, in the absorbed way that has just been described. To make this clear, I would like to say the following. It is something simple, because these things always start from something simple; the first steps follow on from ordinary life. Only when we pursue the path energetically with inner strength can the end of that harrowing thing I spoke of be achieved.

We can simply reflect on our own destiny. In our daily lives, we experience how external circumstances bring us joy, pain, renunciation, and courage. Basically, in our daily lives, people relate to these twists of fate in the same way that people relate to natural phenomena. He who has no inkling of natural laws sees the sun rising and setting, and the stars rising in the night sky; he sees the processes that otherwise develop around him, but does not see any kind of connection between them. Now, through scientific knowledge, man is beginning to see laws in these successive facts and processes. If we have come so far in the course of human development that every educated person recognizes that external facts and natural processes can be understood through lawful connections, then we have only reached the starting point of the time that will decide to also see through what takes place as so-called life destinies, so that a connection can be found in them. How can we find this connection? Not in such an abstract way, that we search for laws as in natural science and history. This also depends on a devotion of the human soul forces to research. But, as I said, starting from the simple, we can make these two paths into the spiritual world clear.

If we ask ourselves: What are we as human beings who can do this or that, who have acquired abilities? If we reflect on how we have acquired such abilities, how we have acquired what we can do, we will come back to the earlier time of our present life. If we do not review our lives thoughtlessly, but really put ourselves into these life contexts, we have to say to ourselves: I would now not be able to do something that I can do if certain coincidences of fate had not befallen me between the tenth and twentieth year. It is because this or that happened to me that I have received these abilities. And if you follow this train of thought further, you come to the conclusion that you actually owe what you are to your destiny, that what is now our whole self has come together through fate. What the self is for the world is what one can do. And you will find an intimate connection between what you understand and what you have once experienced as the vicissitudes of life. And when we do not merely exercise our intellect in this train of thought, but engage our whole soul, that is, our whole feeling and willing nature, when we give our whole mind to this willing and immerse ourselves in such a process of experience, then what we are grows beyond ourselves and grows into destiny. We say to ourselves: Destiny is what sustains us. Just as the sea carries the iceberg on its waves, so the destiny that we survey carries our self. Our destiny has made it what it is now. This can be the beginning of such an inner experience.

But if you do not let this inner experience flash by, as you are accustomed to doing in your outer existence, but instead allow it to take place again and again as a spiritual-soul experience, if you repeat it over and over again, then the matter goes much further. Then a spiritual-soul experience will arise from it that is independent of the body, like the processes described above, except that this experience is quite different. It now shows us how we do not actually grow into our spiritual and mental core, but have to imagine ourselves growing together with the whole universe. We flow out into our whole universe, as it were. And we discover our self, not now within us, but in the world outside, where we previously only perceived objects that are outside of us. It is a long way again. We know that what we are otherwise accustomed to finding within us, we receive from the world; we have to lose ourselves in the way we always are, and we have to receive ourselves anew from the spiritual world in which we now are.

Man has an unconscious aversion to this experience at the bottom of his soul. He has a certain fear of having this experience, only he is not aware of it. There is much in our soul that does not come to our consciousness. But this fear is also covered by a veil. For we discover how we could previously feel like the plant germ [gap in the text] when it feels particularly strong, when we experienced powerlessness, we now feel as if we have been lifted out, but not in the same way as in the earlier exercise, when we lose the ground under your feet, but now you feel as if you are enchanted, as if you are petrified, frozen; you feel as if everything in us that is alive has frozen into stone, like a stone mass that is stuck in its existence. Now you realize that you learn more and more and more to distinguish: the rigid shows something that wants to continue forever, even into death, and what you recognize in it, wants to go through the gate of death, wants to enter a spiritual world.

It is something within us that guarantees that our existence does not end with death, but, just as a plant bears the germ of a new plant within itself, bears the germ of a later spiritual life within itself, in order to then return to a new life on earth. What one experiences in this way can be described something like this: One year you notice this stiffness; after a few years you find the results of your life even more rigid; after a few more years you have the experience of an even harder one, and finally you discover in what you experience what you have brought with you from the spiritual world through birth; what one has brought over from earlier earth lives into this life and what separates, consumes itself in the present life; what is driven to form the body between birth and death, to fill the ordinary life between birth and death. One experiences how, at the bottom of one's soul, in the subconscious, that which lies before the present life on earth collides with that which will lie after the present life on earth. And one perceives at the bottom of one's soul the powerlessness of that which cannot yet live, struggling with that which can no longer live.

And by discovering this struggle at the bottom of one's soul, one begins to know what this human life actually is. One begins to realize that this human life does indeed bring us the goods that we consider valuable above all in ordinary human life. But at the same time one notices that these goods, everything we live through in the waking state, is built on a struggle that takes place in the depths of the soul. At first, looking at this struggle is difficult. And when a philosopher speaks of the limits of knowledge, he basically does not know what he is talking about. What is he talking about? What I have described as the approaching powerlessness that one does not want to let come over one; what I have described as the fear that one shudders from, that does not come up into consciousness; the philosopher does not want to let it come up. He does everything to suppress it, and he masks that by saying: Man cannot know the world. He cannot know it without taking the path through powerlessness and fear. But this path is to be avoided. And by not admitting this to oneself, one states: human knowledge cannot go further than where Kant described it as being at its limit.

But the real reason for the fixation on the limits of knowledge lies in what I have just explained. But if you really look at what is going on at the bottom of the soul, you will not encounter a timid or despondent view of life, but you will know that this life, even the most mundane life that the simplest person can lead, is based on the fact that an infinite amount is going on in his soul. Yes, the life that we apply in thinking, feeling, and willing for our everyday tasks must be brought about by spiritual and soul forces that lie below the threshold of consciousness, in a real struggle; it must be won through a great and mighty victory. That we can live as human beings between birth and death is thanks to the victory of the powers that rule within us as described. The path of spiritual research is one of great sacrifice. But the result is such that it gives us strength of soul, because we experience inwardly that we could not be human if unknown spiritual powers did not have a tremendous task to accomplish in guiding us to what we are in everyday life.

We conquer trust, faith and hope as strength of soul when we allow the insights of spiritual research to take effect on us. And the objection is not justified, which would consist, for example, in saying: Yes, but all this can only be experienced by the spiritual researcher. No, it is not like that. Just as the chemist carries out his experiments in the laboratory and the other people are not present, so the spiritual researcher carries out these experiments in his spiritual-soul laboratory, experiments such as those just mentioned. And just as the chemist hands over what he has researched for the benefit of the general public, so the spiritual researcher can present what he has researched to his fellow human beings in a suitable way. And just as one does not need to be a chemist to have the products and their uses that the chemist produces, so one does not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand - I now say “to understand”, not just “to benefit from” - what the spiritual researcher brings forth in his spiritual laboratory, if one only overcomes the prejudices that come from clinging to the usual habits of thought.

This is precisely what must always be said: to explore things, to see into that which weaves and lives behind life, one needs spiritual research. But once things have been researched and put into words by the spiritual researcher in ordinary language, then it is only the prejudice that one has been brought up with by ordinary science that always tells one: That is not true. For spiritual science appeals to that which, as a natural sense of truth, is not only acquired but innate in man. And the time will come, most certainly the time will come, when people will not understand that they once resisted the results of spiritual science. Then people will say to themselves: Yes, the only reason why they did not understand what the spiritual researchers said, what they presented to people as the results of their research, was that they were accustomed, through scientific methods that had become common practice, to accept only what was called 'scientific', and that they did not want to think impartially about what the spiritual researchers said. Only because of this did they not see it.

Although - as you can read in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” - anyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, at least to the extent that through inner development of the soul they can also recognize as true what the spiritual researcher finds on his path, they do not need to be one. But by ordinary, sound human understanding, if it is not clouded by prejudice, it can be recognized what spiritual research has to say. And the spiritual researcher must say: He immerses himself in the way in which spiritual culture has developed in the world, and then knows that truth and the knowledge of truth will find their way through all prejudices. Today, anyone who adheres to the conventional ideas of science can quite understandably come and say: Yes, what such a fantastic spiritual researcher says goes against common sense, against the healthy five senses! Yes, when Copernicus came and declared: The Earth moves, not the Sun; the Earth moves around the Sun; the Earth does not remain stationary and is orbited by the Sun and stars, but this is only simulated by the movement of the Earth - that was the case, it contradicted what the healthy five senses had always believed until then. The external world view could only be built on the fact that one no longer trusted the five senses. Humanity has also become accustomed to this, even if it took a long time. And so it will also have to get used to what spiritual science has to proclaim. We can recall what Giordano Bruno expressed when, in his deeply feeling soul, he contemplated what Copernicus brought to humanity. We can recall how he said: You humans look up there and see the blue vault of heaven. But this is not there at all; rather, by the fact that your vision works in a certain way, you create the blue firmament for yourselves. In doing so, you set yourselves limits. But space extends to infinity. It is your visual faculty that is to blame for the existence of the blue firmament. And an infinite number of worlds are embedded in infinite space. As Giordano Bruno asserted, it caused offence.

And just as Giordano Bruno spoke in relation to space, so today the spiritual researcher must say: That which man sets as a boundary is like a temporal firmament. In reality there is no boundary, just as there is no boundary to the blue firmament. Rather, human imagination sets its own boundaries. But just as space extends over countless worlds, so time expands in its course. And embedded in the course of time are the successive earthly lives of man, of which Lessing, in the most mature fruit of his life, already spoke as in a spiritual testament. The very clever people say, yes, Lessing wrote many important things, but then he grew old and came up with this crazy idea of repeated earthly lives. That is the method by which even the greatest minds are judged; what is the highest flowering of a great spirit is regarded as a product of the decadence of old age. But that which arose as a truth in the spirit of Lessing will not only provide external benefits, but above all it will have the strength of life. It will give the ever more complicated soul life of people the opportunity to find its way into this life, which we see approaching and which will become ever more complicated. People will need spiritual scientific knowledge as the basis for their spiritual experience, which in the future will have to guide people through circumstances that are becoming increasingly difficult.

Spiritual science will stand alongside scientific research. The spirit will be investigated in this way. Just as we have the sensual world and natural processes around us in this body, so with regard to the spiritual-soul body, we have a spiritual world around us and belong to a spiritual world in which we live in the time that elapses between death and a new birth and that also belongs to our life. This spiritual science wants to be a science not only for the mind, not only for external research, but a science for the whole person, for the human soul. It will fill the soul with what is the elixir of life. In addition to the sensual-physical world, the human being will recognize the spiritual world as it really is. But in doing so, all mere dark, dream-like ideas about the spiritual world will be rejected. For superstition is best combated by really getting to know the spiritual world, by really acquiring ideas about the world of the spirit.

And when it is said on the other hand that religious ideas and feelings are endangered by spiritual science, it must be replied that precisely because of the scientific world view, many a person has been dissuaded from their religious feelings. But spiritual science leads us precisely to the acknowledgment of a spiritual world. Therefore, spiritual science, the science of the spirit, will lead precisely those people who have been or can be alienated from religious thinking back to religious thinking and feeling. The course of the world cannot be held back by force, but goes its way. And just as it was believed that the Copernican world view could somehow endanger religious life, so that religion rose up against it, so it must do so today against the spiritual-scientific world view. However, just as the Copernican world view became established, so the spiritual-scientific world view will become established in souls without disturbing religious life. Yes, it will even be possible to say about the spiritual-scientific world view: When people come and say: Is not spiritual science waging a campaign against religious ideas? And when all sorts of things, including defamation and the spreading of untruths, are raised against spiritual science from such quarters, one would like to say: What kind of an idea of the power of this religion do those have, who are, so to speak, by profession in those communities, perhaps even exercising an office, what kind of an idea do they have, if they can believe that spiritual science could endanger them! He is truly steeped in the belief in the power of his religious ideas who says: the power of religion is so great that one need not fear spiritual science, that we can let what is true in this field approach as much as what science has produced; yes, much sooner. Spiritual science will lead many people back to faith, to religious experience and religious feeling, just as the scientific world view has alienated many people from religion.

It is not just a matter of asserting ideas before you this evening that only reflect knowledge, so to speak, but of showing how spiritual science can engage our whole soul, our whole mind, how it can give strength to strengthening power and courage; how man can be filled with something that radiates from the experiences of spiritual science, how he can strengthen himself with it, how he can face life stronger and more vigorously.

I have already said that the most everyday life is a victory over opposing powers in the depths of the soul. If we familiarize ourselves with the fact that we have something like this at the bottom of our soul, then we can also face with good courage what will increasingly and more intricately intrude into our lives. If we know that life means winning victories under the threshold, then we will have the strength of soul that we need in the bitter disappointments of life and also in the face of the demands of such a fateful time as ours. And even if what I have said in general about spiritual science and the possibility of supersensible knowledge seems to be only superficially and loosely connected, inwardly you will feel that it is well connected with what our fateful days, in the course of which we are living in the thick of it, I would still like to move on to a very brief, concise description of what the spiritual scientist can feel about this fateful time of ours.

If we observe on the one hand how the life we lead may not appear to be particularly agitated and turbulent, but is built on a hidden stormy foundation, then we also imagine ourselves differently in the storm of historical life when it is stirred up, as is the case in our days.

Now I would like to draw attention to something that does not arise theoretically, but sentimentally, from the results of spiritual science for historical life, for the placing of the human being in historical life. It must be emphasized that even the natural scientific world view, and even more so spiritual science, has sought to apply what is called causal thinking to our surroundings. It took a long time for people to get used to this causal thinking. Goethe still asserted: Why do we always want to assert that the ox has horns in order to butt with them? One should look at the organization and show how the forces of growth have developed into the horns. One should look at the causes and not always speak of the purpose alone. The greatest geniuses of modern thought have pointed this out, and more and more external natural science is also moving in this direction. And spiritual science goes much further in looking at the causes, at the unknown causes. But it is precisely by thinking causally in relation to what is happening that one is led to it; in the living experience of the spiritual-scientific results, it becomes a feeling. By looking at what is happening as events, it is not so much the causes that are important to ask about, but the effects. It is as if we are saying: We are in the midst of tremendous events, the like of which have never before taken place in world history, at least not as long as human thinking has consciously progressed. After all, if we disregard minor tribal differences, 34 different nations in the world are fighting each other today. What is being stirred up! And we know what individual nations think of each other, say about each other, claim about each other. But spiritual research leads us, and the results of spiritual science lead us, first of all to realize that a wave of historical development rises from unknown depths, just as thinking, willing and feeling arise from unknown depths.

We do not experience the subconscious soul struggles that we carry within us, but we do experience conflicting forces in history; we are right in the middle of them. In the outside world, we are standing in something that spiritual research shows us for the individual human inner life. And as we, because we lead our everyday lives, stand there as if we were inside the struggles down there - do you think we would not ask about the cause of the struggle, but rather: What can come of it? The struggle as such would not be able to confront us in this way. If we compare these struggles, we would not be satisfied if we did not say: Yes, these struggles develop what the human being first becomes, what first comes to consciousness in thinking, feeling and sensing. And when we are immersed in historical struggles, we are led to ask: What will become of these struggles? And truly, the declamation that confronts us today in our materialistic time, because we have not yet acquired the feelings that I have just characterized, the declamation that has arisen today - Who is to blame for the war? - which always ends with one nation blaming the other, disappears as unfruitful from the point of view that is chosen when one says: Well, these events, they are there, they have arisen in the course of the becoming of the world; what can arise as an effect from these struggles, what can arise from this when more than thirty nations in the world are fighting against each other? And here one must say: when such events confront each other, it depends on one's standpoint whether one can observe fairly. And this is possible in Central Europe. For just as the spiritual researcher sees the process of world evolution, he can say: This Central European spiritual life, which now seems to be besieged as if in a mighty fortress, is one that is developing out of these struggles with opposing forces into a valuable, all-encompassing good.

I could cite many examples to describe what is living in the body of Central European intellectual life, which has produced the great geniuses of Central Europe, with the powers that Central Europe has and which once found expression in genuine spiritual achievements, and today find expression in the fields of battle, where blood and death decide the fate of soul and body. From all this, because one recognizes things by their blossoms and fruits, I would like to characterize that which is present at the innermost core of this Central European intellectual life, throughout this Central European intellectual life, in all Central European nations.

One of the most characteristic spirits of Central Europe is undoubtedly Goethe. Others could be named, but let us single out Goethe. That which was given to mankind from the deepest inner being of the genius of Goethe, that something like that could not be produced by mankind living outside Central Europe, one will have to admit, as well as what must be said with regard to the following.

What Goethe has given to humanity is shown, especially in his greatness, by the fact that even as a young man, Goethe had already written the sentiment that one finds at the beginning of his Faust:

Have now, alas! Philosophy,
Law and medicine,
And unfortunately also theology
Thoroughly studied, with hot endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool, And am as wise as before!

Today, these words have become trivial for many people. But if you completely put yourself in the soul of Goethe, then you feel the whole relationship to what you can acquire, what you want to acquire in the words [to the] earth spirit.

But how does Goethe stand there? Let us take this mood and, with Goethe having written it down, let us now think of the following period, when the great philosophical geniuses – Fichte, Hegel, Schelling – passed through Central Europe. We do not need to agree with the content of their teachings, but when we look at the great spiritual energy with which Fichte represents what he teaches as philosophy; when we see how what he teaches emerges from his entire personality; how he strives to make philosophy an expression of the whole human being.

The following is not intended to evoke sentimental feelings, but to show how Fichte represents one aspect of the Central European genius. It may be described how Fichte, who felt closely connected with the great events that took place on the battlefields of his people, perished. How he, who throughout his entire life had concentrated his thoughts in the sharpest manner to discover the secrets of the world, how he lived in a feverish delirium in the last hours, witnessed the crossing of the Rhine with Blücher, how he lived with everything that had to happen at that time to save Central Europe from Western tyranny. In his delirium, Fichte felt that he was at the center of these events, he, the philosopher, who at the same time was a whole person, a person who at the same time brought the “human being” into his philosophy, even in his delirium. Thus it may be said with reference to Fichte: there the Central European spirit strives for a holistic conception of the world, and with Schelling, with Hegel - one need only look at how truth is presented there.

And now let us look back at this Faust, whom Goethe has speaking in the mid-eighteenth century:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately theology too!
with great zeal and effort.
There I stand, poor fool that I am!
And I am no wiser than before.

Let us assume that Goethe would have been able to live in the forties of the nineteenth century, after the great philosophers had gone through the development of time, let us assume that he would have started his “Faust” in the forties, after he had gone through the culture of the time, through what a Fichte, Schelling, Hegel had achieved. These were indeed also representatives of jurisprudence; Hegel wrote a “Natural Right”, Schelling a journal of medicine; these philosophers wanted to be theologians in truth. Do you think that if Goethe had written these words in the forties, after so much had happened in German intellectual life, he would have written: “Now, thank God, I have studied philosophy, law with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kant and now, thank God, I stand as a wise man and am as clever as no one could have become before!” No, in the forties of the nineteenth century, Goethe would certainly have written the same at the beginning of his ‘Faust’ as in the seventies of the eighteenth century.

Now, alas! I have studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately theology as well
with great zeal.

There I stand, poor fool,

and am no wiser than before!

This is the peculiarity of Central European intellectual life, this Faustian striving, which can best be recognized by its representatives, this perpetual striving and never having the consciousness of being a finisher. This is what made Fichte so great, from a Central European intellectual culture, that he shows us that in this culture people have to live who can never be finished, never complete in their development. And it is fair to say that in Italy and France, you are born as what you are. You are Italian, you are French, and you refer to what you were born as. In Central Europe, you cannot say that. There you have to discover through your own way of thinking what it means to be a human being. You go beyond what you were born as into what you can achieve yourself. And it is a profound saying of Goethe's:

What you have inherited from your fathers,
Acquire it to possess it.

And the other saying:

Whoever strives, we can redeem.

This is one of the characteristics, but also the most significant, of this Central European intellectual life: never to rest, never to stand still. You become Central European. You are French, you are British – you become Central European! This Central European spiritual culture stands before humanity like a glorious ideal. This is what makes it so closely related to what has been presented today as spiritual science itself. And when Faust says – and Goethe only wrote these words at a very advanced age – these words that express the whole relationship of the human being to the world around him and to himself:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Thy countenance in fire turn to me.
Gave me the glorious nature to the kingdom,
Power to feel, to enjoy. Not
Coldly marveling visit you only allow,
Allow me to look into her deep chest,
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water know.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down,
And the hill muffled hollow thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.

There stands Faust. There stands this striving, which must think vividly even in the face of the universe, and it finds not only matter, not only substances, but everywhere the supporting power of what is within ourselves in the universe outside. The spirit of the human spirit rises into other entities everywhere. But this striving also points man back to himself, to the fact that he must find himself. When we survey all this, we must say: Oh, this Central European spiritual life, it has so far shown itself to contain the seeds of what can be sensed today as the goals of a spiritual science itself. This Central European spiritual life cannot be destroyed by its enemies. For anyone who understands its nature knows that it still has much to do in the world, that it is not only growing and justified outwardly, but that it is strong within. And one can and may feel how spiritual science finds just the right soil in this Central European spiritual life. For that which is central European, when applied to the soul, cannot lead to anything other than a deepening of spiritual science. Therefore, it can be said that if conquests have been made in recent centuries, in predominantly materialistic centuries, by any other region of the world than Europe, then it is precisely those that are made by the central European population that must now be made, because mysteriously behind all that we see so painfully unfolding around us today, lives the urge to create a home for the spirit by defending Central European culture as if in a mighty fortress against its enemies.

Today there are people in the Northwest who claim that they must stand up for the freedom of smaller nations, for the well-being of small nations, that they must rebel against Central European militarism, against Central Europe's lust for conquest. The British, who were destined to spread a material culture across the earth, waged 34 wars of conquest from 1856 to 1900, in which they conquered 4 million square miles of land and made 57 million people British subjects. One need only consider these figures and one will realize the truth that can lie in the saying that one wants to eliminate the Central European lust for conquest from the world. This is not even a value judgment. But it must be said: It is evident from Central European intellectual culture that it will develop the spiritual as a result of what must now be fought for with blood, what must be achieved with so many victims, what must be born with so much pain.

It has often been said that the present war is a purely political war and that it is being waged by individual countries for material interests. We can see how even material conquests bear the Faustian character, and that this is not only incorporated as external knowledge, but as an attitude of human and world development, which resounds so characteristically as a Central European mood from the Faustian legend. Yes, there is, as in a flower, the sign of what lives in Central European culture, namely, what Goethe showed on the heights of humanity, what is being fought for today in East and West. For just as the hand must be counted as part of the human being, just as the brain, so must the fighters outside be counted as the spiritual expression of the whole people. This is a single organism. Just as the hand cannot be separated from the head, so too what is being carried out outside with the sacrifice of blood and life cannot be thought of separately from what lives spiritually in Central European culture.

A French philosopher who is respected in many circles today gave a lecture just at Christmas in which he said that everything in Germany is materialized. The old idealism had long since faded away and only the spiritual results were encountered everywhere in the form of warlike mechanisms. He could not deny that French mechanistic tools also work, but he could not get enough of a sharp assessment of the Central European essence, which would now have become completely and utterly materialistic. This French philosopher – yes, I don't know whether one can still call him by the name “Bergson” today, it doesn't sound particularly French, maybe he has already Frenchified it in the meantime – one would have to answer him: Yes, do you recognize the Central European essence in the mechanisms of war? Did you perhaps expect the soldiers to come and recite Novalis, Goethe or Schiller instead of shooting with cannons and rifles? Anyway, there is not much logic to be found in the documents about the current situation. It is quite obvious that they are very keen to prove that basically the Germans alone are to blame for the war; they wanted it! But this logic is no better than the other, which proves through strict logic that the Germans are actually to some extent to blame for the difficult, cruel course of the war. They invented gunpowder, after all! If they hadn't done that, it wouldn't be used today. You can't say that the French invented gunpowder. There are many examples like this. They are really everywhere in today's logic. You can also say: without the art of printing, which was also invented in Central Europe, it would not be possible for those peculiar “truths” that are now being poured out on Central Europe by the British and French press to be printed.

In this way, it can certainly be said that Central European culture is to blame for all of this. In this materialistic age, we are simply blinded by a shortsighted logic. This can be seen everywhere. In contrast to this, it must be asserted that the actual character of Central European culture is not realized in this. One must say that this character, the core of Central European culture, appears only in a germinal way. One glimpses it when one thinks it further, how it bears ever more fruit and how it must spark precisely idealism, spiritualism, the spiritual life of humanity. And one then notices how it carries the soul, precisely out of the kind of connections that spiritual science provides. So it could also be said that spiritual science appears as a fruit that can be sensed for the future and that must develop out of what is the deepest, innermost essence of Central European culture. Therefore, the feeling that is born out of spiritual science gives Central European people strength and confidence and hope and faith for that which our fateful time carries in its bosom. This faith can arise out of what spiritual science gives when it takes hold of the whole mind.

Therefore, I would now like to summarize, not in an abstract way, but in a way that is in keeping with my feelings, what I have already expounded at length through my all-too-long consideration. For the best that spiritual science can give is that it does not ultimately lead to knowledge, not to a list of these or those laws, but that what can be known in it is concentrated in a fundamental feeling that that places the human being in the world in such a way that he knows: you do not only stand in the body in a physical universe, but you stand in a soul-spiritual universe with your immortal, eternal self. Through birth and death you have come to know death as life-giving. It is with this feeling that those who understand spiritual science go through life, soul-inspired, hopeful and also full of strength, and it is with this feeling that I would now like to conclude this evening's reflection before your souls:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
The realities of life
Are revealed to the soul.
The soul creates the key,
When it grows strong within itself
In the struggle that world powers
On their own ground
with human powers,
When it expels through itself
the delusion of the powers of knowledge
in their sensory limitations
wrapped in spiritual night.

Dear attendees! I am well aware that there are many personalities who, based on their education, are called upon to judge and who will not find what I will venture to present this evening scientific, and that the various reasons and objections to the spiritual science meant here must actually have been exhausted by those who represent them, I would say, from their own nature. Due to the limited time available, I cannot go into objections today. In fact, if I do not want to be too verbose – I would actually have to give a whole series, a cycle of lectures – I can only give a brief, cursory sketch of what the essential goal of the spiritual science just mentioned is.

I would like to draw attention to just one thing from the outset: that what is most unusual, what most often gives rise to objections to what is presented here, is that it is not about the expansion of any kind of scientific or other knowledge or other knowledge in any direction, in the way that this knowledge already is, but that it is a matter, dear honored attendees, of developing a completely different kind of knowledge instead of, or rather in continuation of, the one that people are accustomed to according to our present-day consciousness of time. This spiritual science wants to show that the usual, familiar knowledge is not suitable for penetrating into the reality of the world in which the fundamental and most meaningful questions about the human being are rooted, the questions about human immortality and human freedom.

But there is another factor that must be taken into account if we are to arrive at the right kind of spiritual science. This is that in order to penetrate to a different kind of knowledge that can only penetrate into such questions as those mentioned, in order to penetrate to this knowledge, one must first have had, with one's whole soul, with one's whole knowledge and other human struggles, must have had two-sided experiences, not just experiences that are otherwise recognized as experiences of knowledge, but experiences that are really connected with human development in its deepest, most meaningful sense. Experiences that, so to speak, bring people together with everything that leads them to the limits of reality in the loneliness of knowledge, and so on, and so on.

So these experiences are two-sided, honored attendees. The one who wants to advance spiritually must first have experienced what can happen in our soul in the face of the desire for knowledge when it appropriates, in one way or another, the knowledge of nature that has reached such a high level of development and such tremendous perfection in our time, or at least in such a way that it can have an experience of what knowledge of nature reveals to the soul, what it gives it. I can only indicate and characterize natural knowledge. I am not inclined to belittle natural knowledge in any way. Those who enter into spiritual science will see that it recognizes natural science, especially in the form that corresponds to the new era.

Knowledge of nature is suitable for penetrating to a certain degree into reality. But this knowledge of nature comes to certain areas where it has to develop concepts, and in the face of these concepts, what the soul has in its deepest depths as a goal of knowledge usually fails. Such concepts are already the concepts of matter as the carrier of material existence, as they are handed down to us through observation of the senses.

You may be aware of the amount of honest, conscientious, and serious thought that has gone into such ideas in order to arrive at their meaning, such as the idea of matter or force and the like. But anyone who not only tries to speculate, to philosophize about such ideas, but who follows with his soul everything that the soul can muster to form such ideas out of experience and thought, comes to say to himself: It is in the nature of the human organization to form such ideas, to form such alternating in the changing world and then leave it at that, not to penetrate any further, because – as I said, I can only give results, you can find the rest in my books – because man is forced to put these ideas forward in order to have, so to speak, a backing to develop the other life, namely the life of knowledge.

What is the situation with these images? It is like a mirror. You stand in front of a mirror, dear ones, and see yourself in it. The mirror is necessary for you to see yourself in it. Certain images in our organization are necessary for us to arrive at other images. They are there like a mirror of the soul. If we want to penetrate into these ideas in the same way as we usually do into our external reality, it is as if we wanted to break the mirror to find out what we see in it. This is actually the case with all borderline ideas in the knowledge of nature.

If you wanted to continue in the same way, you would be in the same situation as if you wanted to break a mirror to find out what is behind it and what causes you to see yourself in it. This is also the experience that one has when reflecting on what is taken for granted in philosophy. If one wants to penetrate behind the surface of things through philosophy and speculation, it is like breaking a mirror to discover what one will not find behind it.

Now, for someone who sees something like this in the direct experience of the soul, the significant and important question arises: What is it about human nature that we must inevitably come up against such limits, that we must indeed place something in front of us that we can use as a counterweight, that we do not break, to put it figuratively, but simply have to leave in our everyday consciousness? Where does that come from? When one investigates this question, one arrives at a meaningful human soul experience, a secret of the soul; one arrives at recognizing how something in human life, in the whole human organization, is connected with this mirroring nature of our knowledge of nature. One can answer spiritually researched questions of the soul life to a certain extent.

What would human soul life be like if it were not like this, if we did not have this mirror in front of us? One would have to miss an element in this human soul life that is absolutely necessary for this human life, for human existence between birth or conception and death. If human knowledge were such that it could disappear into this borderline perception, then the human soul would have to do without the possibility of grasping in love that which it can only see in the mirror through its emotional life. The nature of the mirror, which is connected with our outer sensuality, is at the same time that which ensures that we do not face external reality in a coarse and unintimate way, but rather that our thoughts fail at the moment when they kill love in a dry and sober way. We must be organized in such a way that we cannot go further on the path of ordinary sensory knowledge or its dissection than we can, so that we do not lack the ability to love.

I would like to make this very clear: the fact that we are limited to these two sides is what makes us capable of love, and so the spiritual researcher comes to realize through direct soul experience that knowledge of nature cannot lead to true reality, because delving into ordinary knowledge, into this true reality, causes the ability to love to dry up in man. This is the first experience one has when on the path of spiritual science.

What I have told you now is described in more detail in my book 'The Riddle of Man'. It arises as a direct, real experience; that is one thing. There are very many people who have not quite clearly or more or less intuitively realized that knowledge of nature does not lead to the depths of human soul life, or to spiritual existence at all. Such people have doubts about the knowledge of nature and then turn to another kind of knowledge. This other kind of knowledge gives the second experience I have to talk about, which must be preparatory for the spiritual researcher. The first is the failure of knowledge of nature, the second is the failure of another kind of knowledge, which very many people seek at the moment when they often only instinctively doubt knowledge of nature. That is mysticism. Mysticism is to be understood only in the sense that I myself will characterize it.

Mysticism in the ordinary sense is understood to mean immersing oneself in one's own soul life with the means available in everyday consciousness. One wants to remain there, but one tries to turn one's attention away from the sensual world, one tries to become blind and deaf to it, so to speak, to sink down into what one can experience in one's own soul life. This mystical knowledge is described by many as very satisfying, since the path of the external does not lead to the secrets of existence, does not lead to the core. What is called philosophy is a hybrid. Many branches of philosophical knowledge tend towards what I call mystical here, others towards knowledge of nature. Anyone can gain knowledge by immersing themselves if they let Meister Eckehart or other mystics take effect on them.

The experience shows that by diving into the depths of the soul life with the ordinary consciousness, whether it is meant more or less scientifically, mystically or religiously, one also comes to unsatisfactory results in this way, as in the external way of knowing nature. If we are honest, if we are fully conscious, if we are not a dreamer or a fantasist, we will always be able to say to ourselves on the mystical path of higher self-knowledge: Something intrudes into what one experiences inwardly in contemplation, something that is connected with the subjective experience, that does not penetrate below the foundations of the subjective human will, something colored by what one gives shape to, and in the end one says to oneself: Even in this way, one does not go further than images, very meaningful, often inwardly shattering images perhaps, that arise from an intimate coexistence with the core of the world, but actually only images. One learns to recognize the pictorial character as a mystical experience, especially when one wants to penetrate mystically into human experience with full real deliberation.

And so we are confronted with a certain limit here as well. What is it in the human organization that makes it necessary for us to come up against a limit even with mystical knowledge? What would a person lack if, following the ideal of certain mystics, they were able to immerse themselves in the depths of their soul in such a way that they collided with the essential core of existence, where the core of our soul life also lies? Just as we previously lacked the ability to love, so now another soul ability would be unable to be our own if we were able to penetrate to the core of our own existence and that of the world through mystical contemplation; a meaningful, indispensable soul ability would not be there, that is the ability to remember. On the path that leads us to the core of existence with everything we experience in the world, we would not be able to encounter in our soul the power that makes us capable of remembering as human beings. We have to keep our imagination, our perception, our feeling and our will separate through our organization, because the ability to remember is placed in the middle of them. By immersing ourselves in ourselves, we must be able to remember.

We see, two already harrowing experiences are there from which the spiritual researcher must start, and the spiritual researcher must have the courage to say to himself: These are essentially the two ways in which one can somehow penetrate with the ordinary consciousness. He must also have the courage to reshape this ordinary consciousness, to give it a different character, to awaken, as it were, from this ordinary consciousness a different, higher consciousness, which relates to the ordinary consciousness as the ordinary consciousness relates to the sleeping consciousness. We know how the soul struggles for the strength to make a distinction between what is in reality and what is in dreams. It is necessary to awaken from the ordinary consciousness that we need for our knowledge from morning to evening to a higher consciousness, and only in this higher consciousness can we experience what is connected with the real riddles of the human soul.

Just look at the question of immortality, esteemed attendees. Today it is really placed in the quest for knowledge of people, and since people today have become accustomed to making scientific demands on such questions, no longer wanting to be satisfied with the traditional way, it is a scientific task to discuss such questions as the question of immortality. A great many people are mistaken. Many try often to somehow prove, more or less philosophically or more or less amateurishly, that something lives in the human being that outlasts death, but that is not enough, dear attendees.

One must realize: anyone who can only provide evidence that something survives death has actually done nothing special for the question of immortality. Because the question at hand is whether, when a person has discarded his physical body, a high level of consciousness is still associated with his soul essence without him living physically. All the rest are subordinate questions. For example, whether some ethereal fluid, a nebulous being, lives on as the soul, cannot interest the human being if he cannot penetrate to the realization that the continuation of life is conscious, that consciousness is possible without the organization of the body; for it is clear to spiritual science and natural science is clear that our ordinary consciousness, the everyday one, is so intimately linked with the physical life organization that one can only speak of a functioning, a powering of this ordinary consciousness when this consciousness is carried by the bodily organization.

It is therefore incumbent upon the spiritual researcher to show that consciousness is possible without physical life. Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to point out to you, so to speak, for the sake of context, some things that can support us in understanding what I am about to show, such as the knowledge of nature, even if it honestly strives to do so, can only get to a certain point in relation to the human soul and cannot go beyond it. I could give hundreds and hundreds of examples that would point in the same direction. I will give an example from literature, so that it can be verified, an example that you can find under the title 'On the Subconscious Self' by Waldstein, which was published in Wiesbaden. Waldstein cites an experience through which a kind of limit of scientific observation is revealed to him, but to the spiritual researcher much more.

He was once standing in front of a bookseller's shop window as a naturalist. His eye fell on a book that showed the title “Mollusken”. The naturalist had to smile when he looked at the title page, but was not aware of any reason to smile when he read the title of the book “Mollusken”. So he takes the following recourse to get to the bottom of the matter. He closes his eyes and pays close attention to what he can now hear, and in the distance he hears a hurdy-gurdy, which is barely playing a melody, to which the observer, who has to smile, learned to dance in very early years; he is aware that he did not pay attention to the melody at the time, only to the steps he had to learn and to what he experienced with his partner; but after decades, when he stands in front of the mollusc book, the reminiscence comes from the depths of his soul. That sound, which was not clearly absorbed at the time, comes up in the soul and causes a smile.

The spiritual researcher must pay particular attention to such things, because they show the caution that must be exercised. Many a person believes himself to be a mystic and experiences this or that through delving into the soul. What comes up is often only the long-gone organ tone, which one takes only for a deeply mystical experience, because such things also transform themselves.

Many examples could be given where mystics, who consider themselves to be very profound, tell you all kinds of things about inner experiences that take them to the boundary of the spirits and are nothing but an old hurdy-gurdy. But it is precisely in such experiences, dear attendees, that one finds the whole meaning of what human memory is. You may know that we cannot develop our self-awareness without memory. Self-awareness is very closely related to the continuous ability to remember. But the ability to remember is also one that is very often connected with the subconscious, with the so-called unconscious soul forces of our soul life. It is therefore particularly important to bear in mind that spiritual science, which seeks to penetrate into the reality of the spirit, is clear from the outset that everything that is connected with the ordinary ability to remember does not lead to knowledge of the spiritual world at all. The fact that we recognize that we are led to a certain limit, beyond which we must go if we want to enter the spiritual world, results in very specific difficulties, which are such that many people say: What a spiritual researcher says is unbelievable. This is said because what he says is very far removed from the usual thinking that people are accustomed to.

People are accustomed to thinking in such a way that everything that is carried by memory radiates into their entire mental life. I said that the spiritual researcher must have the courage to develop a different way of knowing. He can achieve this in two ways. By making himself capable of leading such a soul existence that, with the connection of memory for a period of time – you cannot be a spiritual researcher all day long – develops such strength in his soul that it determines the soul, sets it in motion, but without the ability to remember being used. How is this ability attained? It is attained through a very specific kind of meditative life. This is a kind of inner contemplation, but under very specific conditions. In our ordinary everyday consciousness, the soul power is at work in that we perceive the outer world and form our ideas about what comes to our attention. In sensory perception and in the life of imagination, that which connects us to reality on one side brings about revelation.

Those who do certain soul exercises, which are suitable for combining into one, in a sense, what is otherwise drawn together in perception and imagination, arrive at a completely different way of imagining, of knowing. To do these exercises, one must try to bring into consciousness such images that can be surveyed as completely as possible. To do this, it is necessary to be quite sure that these images cannot be drawn from ordinary or subconscious memory. Those who want to do the exercises would do well to seek advice or look for them in the literature of spiritual science. You can do it approximately, and that will lead you to your goal, but you have to make sure that you fully understand what is present in your consciousness. However, it does not have to be abstract thoughts that are symbolically connected to external reality; they should not depict anything superficial, because what is an external image is linked to memory. For example, we have to let the idea of the flooding light be present in our consciousness. And if you keep coming back to such exercises, if you bring it to the point where the whole power of the soul can concentrate in meditation on such ideas, which you fully grasp, where you are quite clear about them: only where there is no memory of what you have put together in the present will it work its way into consciousness – a kind of thinking will immediately come that at the same time encompasses what the soul has to establish against the external perceptions. One becomes blind and deaf to them, but one performs the same activity that is otherwise performed in external perceptions.

In this way one arrives at an imagination that works with the means of perception, at a kind of union of the power of perception and the power of thought. And when this is developed more and more, one notices: something arises in the soul that was not there before. You get to know new sides to people that have been slumbering in the depths of the soul, you learn to go beyond the ordinary way of thinking in the human soul nature, but the realization that 'time becomes space' occurs, the strange thing is that you can look back on what you have experienced. Ordinary memory, which is tied to ordinary day-consciousness, shows: the experience has passed; we present the experience anew by having it again in memory; we cannot look back on the experience.

When one has done such exercises, the past is present; one looks into time, a new soul ability arises, a new reality. If one is able to see the spiritual in the sensual, before one discovers that what only appears as past in the ability to remember, what can always be seen spiritually, is there, then, dear ones, one can have penetrated to this new kind of cognitive ability, then one arrives at feeling more and more, which can be described as a new self-awareness.

This new self-awareness must be experienced if one is to have even a rough idea of it. Some people rightly find lectures on spiritual science more difficult than others because our words are only shaped for the sensual and therefore our words are not very suitable for the supersensible. However, the spiritual researcher is forced to use words in a different sense than the ordinary one. He must use words through gestures, must point to what is going on in the soul. Words are gestures of the soul. He must count on the receptivity of every human soul that rests in the unconscious. In this way one arrives at a new kind of self-awareness. Only now does one get a true-to-life idea of what it means to experience oneself in one's soul and spiritual life independently of the physical organization. Why? Just as you have the table outside of you, so in this experience you have your own bodily organization outside of you. You experience yourself very certainly in a self-awareness that is independent of the bodily organization.

Now, however, a second exercise is necessary. At first, when you do such exercises, you only gain this self-awareness, and in it you feel constrained, trapped in a soul existence. It is as if you knew you had eyes, but they did not have the transparent glass liquid. You then feel the eyes within you, but you do not feel connected to the objective world through the eye. So self-awareness awakens first; but you feel as if you are in a mental haze, but you do not feel connected to the mental outside world. You know you are in it, but self-awareness must first become transparent. One arrives at this through further exercises. When one develops such thinking, which is at the same time a form of perception, one soon recognizes that one plunges into a world of images; one does not just have the new self-awareness as a basis for experiences, but lives in a world of images. It just flows towards one, but one becomes opaque in one's self-awareness.

You now have to acquire the ability to suppress the images that are flooding in through further exercises. You achieve this by strengthening your will more and more. Strengthening the will – which is usually directed outwards – in such a way that it is now directed towards one's own development, towards practising strict self-education, for example, towards seeing clearly what one has experienced, towards directing the will inwards, towards suppressing perceptions and images, towards becoming master of them in the new self-awareness; this makes it transparent and reaches the point of seeing only - although this only gives the experience - the truly spiritual world, which is just as truly there before the human soul as the world of colors is before the eye, the world of sounds before the ear. This is a world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, to which we belong with our soul being just as we belong with our physical body to the external world perceived through the senses.

That is the way to reach the spiritual world on the one hand. This must be an experience that is based on the lack of results of mere natural science and mere mysticism. One comes to grasp the world as pure spirituality, so that one then retains a view of what I have called the past, that which lives in time. It is quite natural that one broadens one's view, extending it beyond the limits of birth or conception. As man searches up to his ancestors, looking up, so he looks through his inner soul to spiritual research, to what lived and breathed in the spiritual world before man became aware of the world. The spiritual researcher proceeds differently than the natural scientist; the spiritual researcher must show a way, not results like the natural scientist.

I have described the path that the human soul must take in a strictly regulated way in order to recognize the prenatal, spiritual, and soul aspects within itself. All speculations about immortality must ultimately lead to unsatisfactory results if one seeks the immortal as a goal to strive for. You cannot, all speculation fails. In the one path, you find the prenatal soul that lives in us and truly comes from the spiritual world, like what lives in us physically from our parents. This momentous experience becomes particularly harrowing for the soul when this soul comes to truly understand how this prenatal life, this spiritual, soul existence, is connected to the things we otherwise have around us in our ordinary consciousness.

I do not like to talk about spiritual research, about personal experiences. But all these things are personal experiences that have been taken to the point of objectivity. I must confess that one of the most harrowing experiences of my inner soul life in this area was when I once, I would say, beheld with the human thinking, the imagining, as I had practiced it as described, our prenatal human soul existence, purely spent in the spiritual world. The prenatal soul experience reveals itself through the experience. If you manage to shape your exercises more and more so that there is possibly nothing abstract about them, but rather you live completely into the image, if you manage to awaken the way you live to such liveliness, as otherwise only the experience of sensory perception is, if you live so vividly in the soul as otherwise only in sense perception, then, however strange it may be for today's thinking, the intuitive knowledge comes, then the previous earth life is experienced, the prenatal, purely spiritual life is experienced, which penetrates through the last of the thoughts, the spiritual reality, which was already its physical reality before. When a person, through the strengthening of his soul life, is able to think so powerfully that, although he perceives nothing externally, his thinking nevertheless sees the truth of the past life with the same vividness with which he otherwise looks at flowers and plants, their color and their growth, that is staggering.

A property of this clairvoyant insight, this seeing insight, is precisely the following. They have seen that a kind of insight must be developed that does not appeal to the ability to remember. Once the spiritual researcher has such an experience, he cannot remember in the ordinary sense. It is a present experience, the memory ceases. The exercises lead the spiritual researcher to the point where the memory is not appealed to even when his ideas arise; nor can he ever rely on the ordinary memory through which he looks into the spiritual world. If we want to have a second corresponding view of the spiritual world, we must not remember the view itself, but the path we took to it. This is what is terribly disappointing for beginners. They first come to spiritual experiences through exercises as set forth in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. They then believe they have it as a lasting possession, but one cannot remember it and repetition is always difficult because one has to make greater efforts to have the spiritual vision again.

I have described certain exercises to you, through which the soul comes into a completely different state, through which a different kind of knowledge is developed, through which one becomes able to look into the eternal of the human soul. Something else is connected with these exercises. When one has really gone through the preparatory paths, experienced the limitations of natural knowledge and mysticism, when one has really gone through all this in one's soul, one comes to the point where one gradually says to oneself: You still have to make more efforts to come to a completely different kind of soul organization. You then have to progress further by developing the exercises into something that, in a sense, enlightens you about certain things, an inner experience that is connected to other experiences you have in nature knowledge and mysticism. One feels separated from what is inwardly pure in the body – in mysticism – the basis of thinking, feeling, willing, and imagining. That is the peculiar thing. When one does such exercises, one is also brought closer to material life, and by seeing through it, one's spiritual life is clarified.

We have certain concepts of what imagination is, of how we form ideas. But how many conscientious investigations have been made to discover how this thinking, which has perceptions, is connected to the body? Through the exercises I have described, one comes to be, so to speak, closer to one's soul, mind and physical body.

Imagination is experienced in a different way, dear audience. By developing ideas and thoughts, the brain experiences a hunger, and then you experience that it was truly too simplistic a conception of how popular Darwinism views the human organization. It is not so; man is a complicated being, and there are certain states of equilibrium and disequilibrium between his individual organs. If they are capable of thought, our brain will certainly come into such a state that it is in retrograde motion, that it hungers, and without the brain, while the other body is in normal nutrition, is less nourished, is in greater hunger, no alert thought life can develop.

This is also connected with something that can always be verified. Certain people who seek mystical experiences in the wrong way begin to starve themselves. They want to starve the whole body and also starve the brain, which is already hungrier than the other limbs. Through purely spiritual exercises one comes to the realization that the feeling of hunger is necessary in the human brain organization. This leads to the realization that the soul and spiritual life can truly live and exist in its independence through our brain nerves, because we do not develop the life of the organ for thinking and imagining; we degrade it and interrupt the life of the organ. What constitutes animal physical life, we must degrade, not develop, in order to have thoughts and ideas. In the nervous system, space must be made for independent, spiritual, and soul life. Science will come to this very soon. The beginnings are already there that the physical organization of man itself is such that one must admit the independent spiritual soul life. The brain undermines the sprouting life, making room for the development of the spiritual.

The other thing is to get to know the other pole of the human organization. Just as brain life is one pole – see the last chapter on the “Soul Mysteries” – the other pole is the life that is connected with its ability to move as physical life with its will. Man is not organized as simply as ordinary natural science believes. While the brain is atrophied in waking life, another pole of its organization is overdeveloped. The sprouting, burgeoning life beyond the normal limit is what is connected with the extremity of things, with arm, hand, foot, leg. But not only with the outer feet, legs, but also with the continuation into the inner being.

What is connected with this other pole of human organization is not felt in the same way as in the feeling of hunger, but is felt in oversaturation, in survival. It is felt in such a way that, while the human being, in his bodily and nervous life, as it were, returns to the normal organization of his trunk life, he has waking visions and perceptions as a result. The outer organs are overgrown. One need only see the anatomical and physiological connection between the extremities and the other human organs to recognize the physical connection with human reproductive capacity. This corresponds to a spiritual-soul element. The nerve organ is experienced as normal malnutrition.

In the will organ lives as spiritual-soul that which, if it is to be developed, is developed in such a way that one does different exercises. They consist of subjecting the emotional and will life to rules, as was done earlier with the life of perception and imagination. If one looks at something that is not usually looked at in everyday life, then the goal is achieved. One can remember with full clarity what one has experienced; in one's memory, one perceives what one has experienced, including other thoughts that one has had; one does not remember moods or states of mind in the same way.

But this must be trained. Man must train not only those soul abilities that otherwise lead to memory, but also the overview of such things, such as saying to oneself: I was once 17 years old and must be able to visualize the soul conditions that I had at that time. The moods of the soul come up again; one finds how one can follow such moods between birth and present life, one overlooks one's moods. Something develops – one can compare it to inner soul music. Just as in music the preceding tone blends with the following tone, so earlier soul moods resonate in a peculiar way into later ones, and later ones also resonate back into the earlier ones. One recognizes how one develops, how the earlier parts of one's soul life bear fruit later. One must look at oneself in that way in which one otherwise does not look at oneself, what lives in man like the germ that lives in future years, will live in this year's plant. What lives in man goes beyond his individuality, the other link of immortality that goes beyond death. One must recognize immortality as one recognizes the second side. Just as one recognizes the first side through imagination and perception, so one can only see what one becomes in the afterlife by developing one's emotional and will life. This is how one develops other will abilities.

The ability to remember must be suppressed while one is a spiritual researcher. While we have to suppress it in spiritual science, only looking at the present, suppressing memory, the ability to love, the emotional and volitional life will increase inwardly; in the moments where the human being wants to penetrate into the spiritual world after death, his greater capacity for love will also be developed, and it must be developed, otherwise the human being would look into the spiritual world as a guest, and that would be evil. The capacity for love is increased, the capacity for memory recedes.

Twenty-five years ago, I began to philosophically explore the ability to love in connection with the problem of human freedom. At the time, in “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I had to break, so to speak, with the popular sayings regarding love. It is always said that “love makes people blind”; I believe I can rightly assert that true love ability makes people clairvoyant, leads people right into the depths of the loved one. However, ordinary love is very often only connected with a certain selfishness. We love another, foreign being, but we often want to have it differently, find fault with it, we want to make of the being what we wanted to see. That is not yet love, which is actually worthy of the highest sense of the name. It is only truly present when one forgets oneself.

The spiritual researcher must take self-forgetfulness so far that self-awareness is developed outside the body. This increases the ability to love, and we come to not only really see through the other human being in selfless love with clairvoyance, but also to perform actions that do not come from our urges, instincts, or what we desire, but rather come from pure love for the action, from the insightful love that an action must happen, that we completely exclude ourselves when we want to. If we act only out of love for the action, then we approach such an ability of love, which still has to be increased by practice – [see my] “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. One arrives at developing a soul ability that is capable of truly seeing. Man also has something in him spiritually, soulfully, that also goes beyond the physical, that which passes through the death of man.

One can only understand human immortality by really understanding the other state of consciousness, by experiencing in a certain way every day, the consciousness that is not dependent on the physical organization, that becomes independent of the physical experience. It looks at conditions before birth, after death, because it knows itself in an elevated self-awareness outside the body. In this way, the eternal essence of the human being is seen together with insight into the pre-birth and after-death.

The soul must be explored in two directions if the human being wants to see immortality. Immortality cannot be seen scientifically by expanding and broadening one's knowledge, but by acquiring a new way of knowing. It should be noted that this only applies to those times when a person wants to engage in spiritual research. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from awakening to falling asleep; one devotes oneself to it intermittently, for moments that one creates in full consciousness. Then one finds those times when one is in the spiritual world in such contrast to one's ordinary consciousness, as one's daytime consciousness is in contrast to one's sleep consciousness.

It must be emphasized that this is never the right way to spiritual research, when a person, in a self-satisfied, egotistical way, tries to bring into their ordinary life, into the life of their duties, of healthy thinking and healthy coexistence with people, what should only apply in moments when they are devoting themselves to spiritual research. Just as we need to sleep well so that we can live during the day and develop a healthy, conscious life, so we need to live responsibly, fully consciously, mindful of our obligations in ordinary life, not in a false abstraction from life, not in fantasies, in frippery with which one might adorn oneself. A healthy life in the world of the senses is just as necessary for a healthy contemplation of the spiritual world as healthy sleep is necessary for a healthy day life.

It is not necessary for everyone to become a spiritual researcher, although it can be seen in the books mentioned that everyone can convince themselves of the truth of what I have stated today, that everyone can quickly acquire spiritual research skills today. One can, but does not have to. If you put aside all prejudices and want to do for this matter what humanity had to do to accept Copernicanism, you will also develop thinking habits that are quite natural to people and through which common sense can understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, although you cannot prove whether an astronomer is right. You can't do that here either.

This spiritual research, as described here, is something that the present must truly assimilate in the near future. This spiritual development could learn from the unspeakably bitter experiences of the last three or four years, where we can go with our old familiar ideas. Today, far too many people are still too lazy to ask themselves how much part our ideas, which are no longer suited to contemporary life, play in our catastrophic times. In the knowledge of nature, man has such ideas: spiritual, ethical, social and political ideas. If we want to apply the model of knowledge gained from nature to social, ethical and political life, man can only do so if he rises in spirit to grasp the laws that prevail in the spiritual world. For the most important questions in life, for that which the most severe and most deeply invasive events demand, thoughts are necessary that delve into reality, but not just into sensual reality, which is one that is imbued with spirit everywhere. Those who deny that another spiritual world lives within our world, as one looks at it, make the same mistake as those who say that a horseshoe is a horseshoe, and it is in reality a magnet.

Thus spiritual research discovers spiritual reality in the world that is available to us, and through this we learn to intervene in the full reality. But this has become most necessary in our time. We must consciously experience, and allow people to experience, that impulses from our ethical and social history are also interventions. Therefore, spiritual research emphasizes that humanity has struggled to achieve what it calls logical thinking. Today, many people can think logically. But thinking in accordance with reality is what will have as great an impact on human spiritual development as Copernicanism once did. Even if what the spiritual sciences have to say has, in a sense, lasting significance, the spiritual researcher may also, especially in today's world, say what he has to bring out of the deeper reality as a result of the times, which has always been between the lines. We must look to the past, especially to the very recent past. It stands before us questioningly, telling us images, thoughts, ideas, impulses of will; it shows us through events that it has outlived itself. We must look to the future, which we can only master by standing in a different way in the place where we stand through destiny. We must look into the future by looking at the full reality, so that by seizing it we may seek to penetrate the historical, ethical life of mankind as it must be penetrated, as man must intervene. The spiritual researcher may say that he wants to serve human knowledge, human life in time, where such difficulties are being experienced as now, and still he adds hope, he believes that he can serve our difficult time and the difficult future of humanity in particular.

To speak from the point of view of Anthroposophy today still means, quite understandably, to have great opposition, for Anthroposophy wants to speak about things of life and reality in a way that seems to many in our time to be something quite outlandish. And in particular, when a subject is discussed, such as the one that has been chosen for this evening, the immortality of the soul, then very powerful voices immediately rise up from the more scientifically educated circles of our time, who believe that such things cannot be discussed at all from the point of view of knowledge, because these things must be left to the beliefs, the revelations of human feeling, which is not based on direct knowledge, and because in relation to them man has insurmountable limits to his knowledge.

Now, however, anthroposophy assumes that it can speak about precisely such things of life in the same way that today, with strict methods and with a discipline that is aware of its responsibility, it speaks from the point of view of the natural sciences. It is only a question of anthroposophy having to address itself to forces of knowledge which are certainly present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but which are present only for the starting points of their development, not for the further steps. And these further steps must be taken in order to penetrate the spiritual realms of life precisely from the point of view of real knowledge, not from that of nebulous mysticism. The starting point must be what I would call a union of intellectual modesty on the one hand and absolute trust in the perfection of the human powers of cognition on the other. By seeking to unite these two soul impulses, anthroposophy is able to explore the so-called supersensible realm with the same certainty as the senses and the natural sciences are used today to penetrate the realm of the sense world, of physical existence, with such great success and certainty.

What should be called intellectual modesty in this context? We know that within our soul life we have started from the childlike state of soul. We can very well compare this childlike state of soul with dreaming, even in a certain respect with sleep. And just as we awaken every morning from ordinary sleep, so we have awakened from our childlike state of soul to that which is our capacity for knowledge for science and for the purposes of practical life. If we now take the standpoint of intellectual modesty, we say to ourselves: Those powers which you had then as a small child, you have perfected through education and through the influence of life and your surroundings, and you have developed to that point of view from which you today gain your knowledge and your impulses for human life. This is not said with full intensity without intellectual modesty. Rather, one says: From the point of view that I have once acquired, I must be able to say yes and no to all sorts of things, if only I apply the correct methods that are common today. I must also be able to decide what is recognizable and what is to be relegated to the realm of mere belief. -- Anthroposophy counters this by asserting that it is perhaps possible to go beyond the powers of the soul that one has acquired as an adult, just as one can go beyond the cognitive abilities of the dreamy soul of a small child. Of course, it depends entirely on whether such a progression really succeeds, and I would like to speak to you this evening about this progression with reference to the field of soul immortality.

On the other hand, however, anthroposophy has full and intense confidence that the powers of cognition attained by each person can be perfected more and more. Thus it ventures on such a path of perfection, and it begins by saying something like the following: Today we have achieved a certain concept of knowledge through the great successes of the natural sciences. But has this concept of knowledge really been taken out of the full depths of life? It is certainly justified for everything that we strive for in its field. But is it taken out of the full depths of life by considering precisely those questions of human existence that are connected firstly with the deepest longings of human life, secondly with everything that man calls the consciousness of his human dignity, thirdly with everything from which he derives the actual meaning of life: the moral impulses?

All this nevertheless leads us to take certain borderline areas and borderline phenomena of life into consideration when it comes to gaining insights into precisely these most intimate needs and questions, especially those of the soul's existence.

Not in order to say anything valid for knowledge from the outset, but to gain a comparative starting point, let me point out something that presents itself as a dark area and yet as an area that challenges many riddles in life. It is the area that man knows well, the area of dreaming as man experiences it while asleep. I would like to emphasize this explicitly: Nothing is to be made out for knowledge by my mentioning dreams and sleep, but only a starting point is to be gained for our present understanding. Let us imagine in front of our soul these manifold and colorful worlds of images that dreams conjure up for us. We can be sure that they come from the same depths of human life from which our 'daytime imaginings usually emerge. But even during waking we are quite aware that in this extraordinarily interesting 'dream world we are dealing at most with a relative reality, which we can only understand if we understand it from the point of view of waking life. After all, one can at first imagine hypothetically that man dreams throughout his whole life, that he has never experienced anything in his consciousness other than the colorful, manifold dream images. Couldn't life nevertheless proceed in the same way as it does today? We could be driven by certain forces of nature or spiritual powers, without having an awake consciousness, to our daily work and - even if it may seem reprehensible to some listeners - perhaps even to scientific activity; we could carry out this activity, as it were, sleepwalking. Within ourselves, however, nothing could take place except that which we know as the dream world; the outer world would then be completely different from that which we have in our inner consciousness.

If you think about it properly, you come to say to yourself: This world of dreams, we never know it when we are in it ourselves. We would regard the dream world as our reality, which we would dream from the beginning to the end of our lives in the manner described above. That we recognize the subordinate reality value of the dream depends on the fact that we go through the life-jolt from sleep to awakening, that we become conscious of it - I am not speaking now in philosophical consideration, but from the standpoint of popular consciousness - through this life-jolt. Through it we switch that which is our human nature, namely that which is of a volitional nature, into our physical body. Anyone who observes closely also knows that everything that is conveyed to us through the senses in waking life is based entirely on the unfolding of real life in the physical body during waking. Through this involvement of our will in the physical body we arrive at the point of view from which we distinguish the subordinate reality value of dreaming from that reality value which the sense world has for our awakening consciousness. We now know that we are in contact with an external reality through the will inserted into our body. Again, I do not want to speak about this in philosophical considerations, but entirely from the standpoint of popular consciousness.

Now the question arises: Could there perhaps be a second awakening, a second life-jolt out of this ordinary day-waking on a higher level, through which we switch on our life forces into a new element, just as we switch on our will when we come out of dreaming into ordinary wakefulness? - Of course, this is only a question, and the answer to it depends entirely on whether we can set out on a path that is, firstly, inwardly safe and, secondly, can be walked by every person through their own efforts. If we were to come to such a second awakening, then through this second awakening we would gain a point of view through which we would recognize the reality value of our waking life, observing it from a higher perspective, as we observe it in dreams from the higher perspective of ordinary consciousness.

In order to bring about a second awakening, anthroposophy turns first of all to soul forces as they are present in ordinary life, but which already indicate through their ordinary nature that they are capable of development. Now even philosophers admit that what we call human memory points to a more spiritual nature of the human soul; that we cannot treat memory in the same way as we treat those soul faculties which are directly bound to the impressions of the outer sense world. Again, let us not adhere to philosophical considerations, but, as we do in ordinary consciousness, to that which plays a role as memory in man. Through memory we can call up images of experiences we went through many years ago. Depending on our disposition, these images may be more vivid or more shadowy, but they are there before us. When we indulge in ordinary sensory observation, that which we imagine must be present; that which memory gives is not present, it may be long gone. Through our imaginative power we conjure up, as it were, from our own inner being something before our soul which was once there, but which is no longer there, which cannot have a present existence. In this way we gain the insight that we are able to drive out of the human inner being forces of cognition which imagine something that does not exist in the present. And the question arises: Can perhaps through a certain further development of the powers of the soul, as we have developed them since our first childhood, that which underlies our power of memory be further developed? Can it be developed in such a way that we not only imagine what is not there at present but was once there during our life on earth, but that we imagine something that is not there at all? Then we would make the leap of life into a higher reality, into a reality from which ordinary earthly life would appear as the dreaming life does to the waking consciousness.

Anthroposophy now makes such an attempt to develop that which underlies the ability to remember, in order to arrive at this second awakening through the inner practice of life. It addresses itself to the human powers of thought. After all, they are the ones who conjure up in our imagination what we have once experienced. And anthroposophical research proceeds in such a way that it does something with thought that is not actually done with thought in the present age. Today's thinking is - and rightly so from certain points of view - more oriented towards surrendering to the outside world. To allow the impressions of the external world to act first on the senses, to process them by counting, measuring, weighing, to combine them with thinking, is passive thinking, a thinking that man considers all the more secure with regard to knowledge, the more passive it is, the more it surrenders to what the external senses and organs say. Indeed, in order not to gain a fantastic knowledge as some philosophers do, anthroposophy turns to thinking in such a way that it seeks to develop this thinking further than it is in ordinary life. To this end, easily comprehensible ideas, which at first are not even considered in terms of what they mean, are placed at the center of ordinary consciousness and the whole life of the soul is concentrated on such ideas. The life of the soul is completely withdrawn from external impressions and external life by seeking more and more to make this life of the soul stronger and stronger on one or a series of manageable ideas. The result is something that lasts shorter for one person and longer for another, depending on their soul disposition. One person needs three months, another many years. If you repeat these exercises in rhythmic succession, after a while you will notice something in your soul life that I would like to compare with something in your outer life: If you strain a muscle again and again, it strengthens and becomes strong. In the same way, one feels the soul's imaginative faculty strengthening by always concentrating on an easily comprehensible idea; and finally one feels how the whole thinking becomes active, how real life, inner life in the true sense, moves into this thinking. One gradually feels the great difference, which is not only a figurative but a real one, between dead and abstract thinking and that towards which we strive and which we want to absorb into an inner life in the thinking element.

I said that one must start from a manageable idea. In what I am going to tell you today about the exercises of the life of the soul, it is a question of following each step with full human prudence, as otherwise only the mathematician follows his steps, or the geometer, who is aware, when he brings one out of the other, how figure follows figure, how number follows number. This consciousness, which the anthroposophical researcher feels like the strict mathematician: to be accountable as a researcher - this consciousness must prevail.

Of course, all self-suggestions, everything somehow subjective must be excluded. But this can never be ruled out if we take up arbitrary ideas from our mental life; they have many echoes of life in them, they often suggest something to us. But if we put together ideas that perhaps have no external meaning for us at all, such as “light - wisdom” - and concentrate again and again on such an idea, whose reality value remains indifferent to us, with the whole life of our soul, then the thinking ability in us strengthens. In this way we come to know - as I said, for one person it takes less time, for another it takes longer - what this means: life in thinking; for a kind of detachment of a higher person from the person we know lives in our physical body does indeed gradually take place. Just as we become aware in our physical body that it is something living when we move our legs, move our hands, so we become aware through such an exercise: It is something real, living, real, life-real, when I move in the strengthened thinking.

One could roughly say: We finally come to experience a higher person in us through these power phenomena, through which one gropes spiritually, as one otherwise gropes physically with one's fingers. In this way we gradually experience how a higher man, who is experienced in this thinking, is torn away from the physical man; and we have arrived at the supersensible experience, at the experience of the supersensible man, in so far as he passes through earthly life between birth and death. By the fact that one has risen to observation in the inner ability to think, one comes to the fact that one overcomes space through this ability to think, overcomes the present in general and comes to an experience in time. Yes, one feels that which one experiences as the second, detached human being, not actually as a spatial human being. This is the physical human being. One finds that one experiences the second in this way as a human being fluctuating only in time. And that which one experiences there is structured into a kind of tableau which, in a relatively short time, allows one to survey life on earth from earliest childhood to the point in time one has just reached.

There is a big difference between the two things: the life tableau and my memories. You could say: I can also put together this earthly life from my memories. I can put together from my memory what I experienced a short or long time ago. And if I make the effort and if I take my time, then I will have an overall memory of my life on earth. And it could be that I am deceiving myself that in such an examination I have something in my life tableau, which is manageable in a short time, which with the help of subconscious soul forces would bring something similar to a conscious memory picture before my mind. - But one gradually realizes that there is a great difference between what one puts together in one's memory and such a tableau of the soul's life, which stands before the soul as a first supersensible knowledge, initially as a self-knowledge. For when you compile your experiences as a memory picture, you actually always see in front of you what has had an effect on you from the outside. You see people, natural events, the external things that are of interest to you.

This life tableau is completely different. There you have much less of an eye on what has come to you from the outside, so to speak, and more of an eye on what has worked from within. If I have gotten to know a person in life, I remember much less through this life tableau how he or she came across to me, but rather what longings were aroused in my own breast in order to find something special about this person. If I have any natural phenomenon in this life tableau, it is not so much the interesting aspects of the natural phenomenon that make themselves felt, but those impulses from my own human life that follow this natural phenomenon with particular sympathy or antipathy. That which stands before my soul in this tableau is myself, how I have behaved in relation to what I have gone through. One could say, if one wants to draw rough comparisons: This memory tableau that I have described, which can only be obtained after such an examination, is as different from an ordinary memory tableau brought about by memory as the impression in the seal is from the impression in the sealing wax. It is like the negative image to the positive image of that which we can put together through the ordinary memory image.

Thus, when we have gone through the first stage of spiritual practice, we have come to a true self-knowledge of our earthly life. For such self-knowledge is there. There are always nuances mixed in. In this memory tableau you see what has brought you forward; then you say to yourself: “There is something that has made you imperfect, that has brought you back. -- One places oneself in this tableau of memory with human worth and human dignity, and through the realization that is first awakened one attains an idea of that which one is actually only now entitled to call the “ether” of the world in relation to external reality and the sensual forces. The ether of the world, which lives only in the temporal and which to a certain extent gives us a piece of what I have now described as the first form of the higher human being detached from the physical.

But one has not been long enough with this first step. If you want more, you must undertake to continue these exercises of the soul. The next soul exercises consist in using a strongly activated inner will to remove the ideas from the consciousness, just as one has used one's will to place such ideas into the consciousness to strengthen the being and to concentrate on them. As I said, there must be complete prudence, as with the mathematician. For it must be said: We are in a certain way taken in with our whole soul-life by the conception which soon moves into the center of consciousness. And especially when thinking has already become so vivid that we have only this idea itself in consciousness, and that not only such ideas are there, but that our own inner experience appears as in powerful pictures in the tableau described - then we are strongly taken in by what we have before the soul in such a picture heightened to vividness. A greater power is necessary to remove such images from the consciousness than is necessary to remove ordinary images from the consciousness. One knows, by the way, what it means to remove ordinary ideas from the consciousness. Try to admit this to yourself honestly.

When the senses are silent, moreover when the sensually perceived is silent, when the combination of thoughts is silent and the ideas and sensations are, as it were, removed from the consciousness, then man falls asleep. If there is no stimulation from the imagination, he does not have the strength to maintain the waking state. But if one has that strength of soul which is necessary for what I have described, then one also has the strength to take away the acquired ideas which come into us in this way through an inner strengthened life, to keep the whole consciousness empty of imagination and yet to remain awake. Just being awake, imagining nothing, that is what must be striven for as a second state: A waking consciousness empty of content! But this contentless waking consciousness, one can become aware of it inwardly, but it does not remain so for long. Once it has been established, however, the second stage of spiritual cognition occurs. Then one not only becomes aware of what has just been described, which lives in the human being, then the spiritual content of our world environment forces its way into this waking, content-free consciousness, into this empty consciousness. And the second human being, who has first detached himself from the physical, corporeal human being, who was conscious of himself in the course of his entire life on earth, will now not only be conscious of himself, but through this higher self-consciousness he will absorb a spiritual world of his surroundings. Again something appears before our soul which seems strange and foreign to the present man, but which is nevertheless contained in what I have called the second stage of man's spiritual knowledge, inspiration. An exact inspiration occurs there; just as everything I have described here must not be confused with what is often called clairvoyance in a nebulous mysticism. If one wishes to use this expression, one may only speak of an exact voyance, which is only based on the development of the soul forces, like mathematical thinking, which has no external reality in itself, but only one that is formed internally, and to which only mathematical thinking must be added when it extends to the sensory world, as in measuring, counting, weighing and so on.

To this, what one has conceived in an inwardly living thinking, which is modeled on the particular mathematical thinking, must be added what I have described to you here. And through this spiritual work one arrives at knowledge in the same way that we arrive at knowledge through measuring, counting and weighing. And that which occurs is a state of soul life which is not known in ordinary consciousness because it is not necessary. I would like to make clear what state of soul life occurs when awake, empty consciousness is reached.

First we think of ourselves in a modern metropolis, with all its noise, its din; we ourselves do not come to rest, we ourselves are absorbed in this noise, in this din. Then we move away from this cosmopolitan city - the din, the noise become quieter and quieter; if we move further away, even quieter. We imagine ourselves in the solitude of the forest. There is a silence that we can describe as zero in relation to the noise of the city. Silence around us, silence within us. But now something else can occur, although it is not observed in ordinary life. We have to use a second comparison. As you know, if someone has a certain amount of wealth, this wealth can be spent little by little; he owns less and less. If he earns nothing extra, if he continues to spend, then he is down to zero. If he has nothing at all and continues to spend, he is in debt; then he has less than zero. Mathematicians call this negative values, minus. Now imagine that: We have descended from the loud roar, the noise of the big city to silence zero and descend further, and it becomes quieter and quieter than silence and silence zero, so that we have less around us than mere silence, that it is quieter, quieter than quiet. This is the state of soul that gradually occurs when we pass through the empty but still awake consciousness. Little by little we feel quite clearly what I would like to call the deep silence of the human soul. This deep silence is not just silence, it is more or less, as you like, than silence. In terms of tranquillity, it goes below tranquillity zero. But then, when this deep silence of the soul is really experienced, everything that is of spiritual essence around us emerges from this deep silence of the soul. And the full inspiration occurs.

Then we are put into the position, when we have experienced this deep silence of the soul, to actually also now hear spiritually that what lives in the spiritual world. And the ordinary sensory world becomes a means for us to hint at what lives in this spiritual world. I would like to speak quite concretely of real spiritual knowledge. Something sounds out of the deep silence of the soul that makes an impression on me: it excites me, it strikes me with a certain liveliness. I say it is something that makes an impression on me, just as the yellow color of a lively soul life makes an impression on me. Then I have something in the sensory world through which I can express what I have experienced in the spiritual world. I describe this knowledge by saying: It has an effect on me like the yellow color of the sense world, or like the tone C or C sharp, like warmth or cold. In short, that which I have experienced in the sense world becomes for me a material, just as what appears to me in the spiritual world can be described in ordinary words. The whole sense world becomes something like a language to express what one experiences in the spiritual world. This is not understood by those who want to make progress too quickly and therefore stop at superficial judgment. The investigator encounters an experience that makes the same impression on him as the sensual color, and therefore he describes what he experiences spiritually through colors, sounds and so on. Just as one should not confuse the word “table” with the real table, so now one should not confuse it with that by which it is described, the spiritual world itself, which sprouts from the deep silence.

Once one has reached this point of view, one comes to extinguish this whole tableau of life, which one first conjured up, within oneself; not only to evoke empty consciousness towards individual ideas, but towards the whole earthly life of man, and indeed precisely in his inner form. One then, so to speak, extinguishes oneself as an earthly human being. But by now having the possibility to experience the deep silence of the human soul after the extinction of the earthly self, which is bound to the physical body of man, one now experiences that which one has become as a spiritual-soul man before one has descended from the spiritual world and has clothed the physical body around oneself. Out of the deep silence of the soul one experiences the spiritual-soul that one was in the pre-earthly existence. And just as one arrived at one's physical surroundings in the physical body, so, by placing oneself in that which one was in the spiritual-soul world, one arrives at recognizing how one was in the pre-earthly existence in the surroundings of spiritual-soul beings, even as a soul-spiritual being, as a similar being. One enters fully into that spiritual world from which one has descended to earthly existence.

You can realize that in ordinary life the eternity of the human soul is only explored in one direction, the immortality of the soul. But this immortality of the soul has another side, for which the older language still had a word, but no longer the modern language. This soul immortality has not only one side, that of immortality, but also that of unbornness, and it is only from unbornness and immortality that the full soul immortality is composed. Thus one does not arrive through metaphysical speculation, but by awakening the soul itself, and out of the deep silence of the soul to that which is eternal in the human soul, was eternal and was spiritually present before man descended to earthly existence, and remains eternal by dwelling in the physical human body between birth and death.

But we can only approach the eternal character step by step, also through anthroposophical spiritual research. As the third stage I must mention something that may cause a slight shudder, perhaps an inner mockery, especially for those who are sitting here with the usual scientific ideas. I can understand this very well, as I can understand all opposing objections to anthroposophy. Something that we already have in ordinary life can be further developed into a higher power of cognition, like the powers of a child into what we have developed in our adult state, and that is the power of love. Loving is something quite different when it is bound to the human body, when it surrenders to the passions that live themselves out in loving, than when, as I have described, after the physical ego, even the earthly ego from birth to death, has been stripped away, when the human being lives himself out of the physical existence into the state in which he faces the purely spiritual. When he thereby develops the powers of love, of complete surrender, then that which he has experienced in the pre-earthly state, which he now fully realizes, is transformed into knowledge. He experiences what it means to experience full consciousness with reality outside his physical body. And when he experiences this surrender to spiritual experience in this way, then his ego is returned to him in a new way. The ego, which in earthly life lives in selfishness and egotism, which is overcome by acquiring such self-knowledge as is acquired when this ego is twice extinguished, thus develops full love on a soul-spiritual level, and something then confronts you which at first appears to you like a complete stranger, like a completely alien personality. If you strive for this, it will happen in the least. One should strive for the love I have described. Then, because one can go completely out of oneself, one is confronted by what one is oneself, but like a foreign personality, and one only then realizes what this self was like in the past life on earth, which one went through before one came to this life on earth; one only then realizes how the ego was present in the earlier stage of existence on earth, when one is able to feel like a second person through increased, strengthened love. One looks back to a certain point in the development of time where the ego as ego had a beginning, where the repeated earth lives had a beginning. But we cannot speak of that now. We can only speak of the fact that we can look back on a series of earth lives, which are passed through to full human life, between which there are always lives in pre-earthly or post-earthly existence between death and a new earthly birth.

This is the one thing one experiences of the eternal and immortal character of the soul when one has made up one's mind to the recognizing view. The other thing, however, which one acquires through the love that has increased to knowledge, is to be able to experience the higher human being outside of his physical body. That which one acquires further is that one sees how this being is without a body, and the realization of how the body becomes a corpse in death, how this body falls away, how the human being enters the after-earthly life. Just as one has a view of the pre-earthly life, of the unborn, one now has a view into immortality, into the after-earthly life. The moral impulses one has acquired as an earthly human being, which one carries through the gate of death, and how one prepares a new earthly existence together with the spiritual world in order to descend to earth as an earthly human being, this now appears before the soul in vivid vividness, which is based on intellectual modesty, but also on a certain trust in the powers of the human soul.

This leads knowledge to that area of life which is so close to the longings and needs of man. We look at those whom we have loved in life, who are close to us through blood ties or soul ties; we look at the gate of death and ask: What will become of the ties that the blood has spun and of the ties that the soul and spirit have woven when a person has passed through the gate of death? If one has this insight, one knows how the outer physical shell of the physical body falls away from what man is as an eternal being, how man rises into the spiritual world with those laws and lives there with the forces which he has already brought down and with which he has lived in his physical life on earth. We then experience how that which we have in common with other people as blood ties, as bonds of friendship, as bonds of love, falls away from our communities just as the physical body of man itself falls away; and we know from the realization that we meet again the souls with whom a bond has connected us, in pure communion of the spiritual world, because the physical obstacles are no longer there. That what men do not demand to know out of a curious instinct, that what was human dignity, the fate of the souls, that becomes in this way a real knowledge.

And still other things become a real knowledge. The reality of the outer physical world eludes the dream because the will is not involved in the physical body. In dreams man takes the world of images for reality; thus we take much for reality before we awaken in the manner described to the deep silence of the soul, to the spiritual life. When we wake up to the waking spiritual life, after we have gone through the second life-jolt and the physical reality experienced awake appears to us as mere dreaming, then many things that were reality to us in the physical-bodily life appear to us in the higher sense, in the sense of the physical-spiritual life, as a dream. Just as the dream reality is captured by the physically tangible reality, so that which we experience in physical life as moral or religious people is now captured by that to which we awaken through the second life pressure. And we become aware of what was actually meant by people like Knebel, Goethe's friend, who said as an old man: “When one has grown old, one finds that in the face of the decisive events of existence everything seems as if it had been prepared long ago. Everything seems to have been planned by man himself, which has had a profound influence on him as a man or as a youth. And all his steps as a youth seem to point to this experience. - This idea continues to develop and becomes true in the process of formation. If one penetrates this idea further with the knowledge that one gains in the way described, one sees that this is indeed the case in life. One experiences something quite decisive. One is led to a person with whom the further course of life is to be walked together. You look at the steps that have led you to this person. They come from the longing to experience precisely what you can experience with this person until you reach the goal that corresponds to a longing of the soul, a test of the soul in the right way. That which lives in man, through which he conjures up his destiny as if out of himself, must be connected to the view of the earthly lives lived through, in which one was a morally such and such a person, did this and that. And one sees that what one does now seems instinctive in this life, like chance; it is fatefully linked to what one was in the previous earthly life.

This seems to be a devastating thought. But just as little as the fact that we have blond or black hair, blue or brown eyes, lean or full hands affects our freedom, dignity and full responsibility as human beings, so little does it affect what we are as free, responsible human beings when we know that it is the soul that configures us, that as free human beings we have to carve out our life's destiny on a fated basis. But life becomes comprehensible when man learns to look at it, imbued with this idea of destiny, which is quite compatible with freedom, that he does not stand in life in such a way that every moment is like chance to him, but that he feels himself placed in the world of natural necessity, as in the world of a real spirituality, in which he stands as a higher man with his moral, fateful powers. In this way, such knowledge leads man from outer life to the immortality of the soul.

One can still object: Yes, individual spiritual researchers can indeed recognize this, but what does it mean for the ordinary person? - It means just as much as an artistically painted picture to someone who has not become a painter. It would be sad if you had to be a painter to understand a work of art. You only need a certain healthy feeling to experience the artistic, and only healthy human judgment to experience what the spiritual researcher describes. Only if one throws the unfortunately so numerous prejudices in one's own way, then one places oneself before the pictures which the anthroposophical spiritual researcher sketches, as one places oneself before a picture in which, instead of seeing a world, one sees nothing but splashes of color placed side by side. This world is also fully comprehensible to those who live a simple, ordinary life from the description of the anthroposophical spiritual researcher, although he is always able to understand it through books such as “How does one attain knowledge of the higher worlds? “ he is always able to go so far on the path of spiritual research without influencing his outer life that he can check what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher tells him, that he can check whether this anthroposophical spiritual researcher is speaking out of fantasy or whether his view is something that has been firmly acquired, just as mathematical judgments, measuring, counting, weighing and so on are themselves firmly acquired.

This is what spiritual science wishes to introduce into the present spiritual life of mankind. It is that which it must believe corresponds to the numerous innermost needs of the soul. For it is so that today many people instinctively, unconsciously, precisely through what one has become through education, out of the natural scientific prerequisites, gain the longing to know something in a similar way, encompassing the experiences, about that which is so close to the soul and of which I have only spoken today as an example of the immortality of the soul and that which is connected with immortality.

But of course this puts something into the world that is like the Copernican world view compared to the one we were used to at that time. But it is so that what appears to be a human “folly” gradually becomes a matter of course. The Copernican world view even had to wait a very long time before it became self-evident. Anthroposophy can wait. But it must say, out of an obligation to culture and civilization, that it is fully understandable to it when ordinary natural science, which considers itself sovereign with its means, has arrived at a doctrine of the soul without a soul through an ordinary pursuit of the life of the soul with the external means of calculating, counting, weighing, and that it finds an ideal in it. Anthroposophy, however, would like to add to that which it does not deny the justification of on the one hand, to a doctrine gained from natural science, through developed full comprehension of the innermost essence of the human soul, what is soul-spiritual in man as eternal life, what is soul-spiritual in the whole world, in the whole cosmos as eternal life, so that man can recognize himself as eternal, intimately connected with the eternal in the cosmos, as immortal in the cosmos. Anthroposophy therefore wishes to give knowledge of the present human life and the human life of the near future, so that it meets a necessity of the time by adding to the present teaching of the soul without soul a teaching of the soul awakened vividly out of the human soul, which then follows from such a teaching again a teaching of the world permeated by soul, permeated by spirit. And this will be needed more and more.

The words of the ancient Greeks, addressed to man, sound like a deep spiritual admonition: “Know thyself!” These words can be applied to general knowledge of human nature, not so much to personal knowledge. In this way, knowledge of human nature is, as it were, designated as the summit of all human knowledge and striving. And we can also feel from the way this word sounds to us that it is not meant merely in a scientific-theoretical sense, but that it is meant as a spiritual admonition in a moral-religious sense. And one would like to say: After the expiration of a many-sided, self-contained spiritual development epoch of humanity, today a kind of counter-word stands before our soul. This counter-word was pronounced almost fifty years ago and has today, in a certain way, even been forgotten, disappeared from the consciousness of mankind. Nevertheless, the whole modern state of mind, what one carries within oneself today as the great soul conflicts, lives under the influence of this newer word. It is the word that Du Bois-Reymond pronounced, the word: “We cannot recognize,” the word: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.” Even if many today believe themselves to be beyond the confession of this word, in the way we relate to the world as humans, this word is still deeply involved. It is, so to speak, the confession, expressed or unexpressed, of the results of scientific research in their significance for a general knowledge of the world and view of life.

But anyone who has been involved in intellectual life for decades and has observed how this intellectual life has developed over the last three to four centuries can do no other than justify, as it were, what is regarded as knowledge today in relation to science. Natural science has indeed achieved so much in terms of exploring the external world of the senses; it has achieved so much in terms of applying instruments and experimental methods to research into this external world and its great laws, and it has confirmed and corroborated what it has discovered through the manifold empirical, technical and practical applications, without which we could no longer imagine our modern life. This natural science assumes that it can gain knowledge of the world that is as independent as possible of what man, out of his desires and his prejudices and preconceptions, can bring to the knowledge of the nature of things and world processes. And it is precisely by excluding all personal factors that science has achieved all its successes. But now, precisely the person who stands quite honestly on the ground of natural science, who sees through how beneficially this natural science has worked precisely for the knowledge of external nature, must say more and more to himself, out of the handling of the applied methods: to those regions in which the human soul-spiritual reigns, precisely natural science, as it has developed today, cannot penetrate. One might say, not because of its shortcomings, but precisely because of its merits.

If we survey what has been achieved in the various fields of natural science, we will see that this science naturally also strives to return to the human being. It strives to apply its methods to the nature of the human being. But it can only research the external, bodily, physical nature of the human being. We see this most clearly when the scientific method is applied to the human being, when experimental psychology is used, and when truly magnificent scientific research methods are employed. We see how the expressions of the soul in the human constitution are examined. But we become aware that through all these investigations we cannot get at what can be called the eternal in human nature, what must be called that in human nature, in the face of which man carries the deep longing to recognize it in its true essence, and from which he at least initially has hope that it will arise for him as something beyond the limits of earthly life, as something beyond birth and death and having an effect beyond it. Nothing should be said here against such experimental methods as those of experimental psychology. The very field of research from which I take the liberty of speaking to you this evening recognizes the full validity of these methods. But precisely because they can be seen through from this point of view, even within their limitations, it must be said that these methods cannot approach the actual essence of the soul and spirit. And this was what compelled a few insightful researchers to admit that natural science cannot reach what, on the one hand, is the nature of matter itself and, on the other, the nature of human consciousness. But if man cannot explore how his consciousness, that is, the soul-life at work within him, takes hold of matter, then he must bid farewell to that great challenge: “Know thyself!” Then we would have concluded that period of human spiritual development since ancient Greece with the admonition “Know thyself!” as a beautiful, powerful — but nevertheless only one illusion of humanity. Then we must confess: this demand cannot be fulfilled. The deeper one penetrates into the spirit of nature research, the more one must admit from the point of view of anthroposophy that those who speak of the “ignorabimus” of natural science are right, who speak of the fact that there are limits to natural science that it cannot exceed. But the question arises as to whether the human mind can be easily consoled by the mere recognition of such limitations, and whether it does not seek from the outset to disregard what the human heart desires in this respect, as something particularly prejudicial.

The aim of what I would like to characterize to you this evening as anthroposophical research is to provide an answer to this. It seeks to recognize the extent to which this demand of the soul is somehow justified. Many people today see what science has achieved on the one hand, and on the other hand they feel that science cannot get to the actual soul-spiritual. And so many of those who do not want to stop at the confession of the limits of human knowledge turn to one or other kind of mysticism, that mystical way of looking at things that attempts to reach that which relates to the eternal in the human being by immersing oneself in one's own inner self. And through such mystical contemplation many beautiful things have been brought up from the depths of the human soul, from the depths of life that otherwise remain in the subconscious or unconscious. Through such mystical contemplation many people have come to believe that what is brought up from the depths of the soul, what is present in man, is directly rooted in the divine-spiritual existence, so that by brings the divine-spiritual to revelation in the recognition of the human being himself, and thereby advances to the exploration of the eternal character of man and to the connection of man with the divine.

Thus anyone who raises the big questions of human existence today finds themselves, I would say, between two cliffs that seem to set insurmountable limits to knowledge: on the one hand, natural science, and on the other, mysticism. However much mysticism promises, however beautiful and magnificent it draws from the human soul, most mystical attempts cannot stand up to truly scientific and disciplined knowledge. For anyone who has been accustomed to judging all things, including those within himself, by the conscientious methods of natural science, will soon find that what the mystic often brings up from the depths of his soul is nevertheless nothing other than what he may have received or acquired in the outer world in the form of ideas or feelings from some distant period in the past feelings, which then, perhaps through a beautifully working imagination, have grown into powerful images, but which ideas and feelings, by descending into the depths of the human being, have been changed by the human organism, which for external knowledge has such a secret and meaningful connection with the soul. And it is precisely to the deep soul-searcher that it reveals itself, how that which one, in a mystical way, has gained, one holds for eternal, is nothing more than a modified, even modified by the human organism itself, result of memory.

And so, in the end, if one wants to approach deeper experiences, the great questions of human existence, one must admit: natural science offers no possibility of penetrating into these questions. It closes its insights in one area, so that with its insights one can only recognize the external aspects of the human being, and one cannot get close to the human being with them. This is the necessary conclusion that one must come to. Especially serious and honestly meant natural science does not come close to the human being. And mysticism, as it usually appears at first, does not come from within the human being. By penetrating into the world, natural science does not come from the world to the human being; by penetrating into the human being, mysticism does not come out into the world from the human being. If we allow ourselves to be deeply affected by what the soul receives from these two perspectives, we cannot but ask ourselves once more: Is it not perhaps possible to go even further than what mysticism gives on the one hand and what knowledge of nature gives on the other?

Now, in the lecture I was privileged to give at the Urania a few days ago, I took the liberty of pointing out how anthroposophy, as spiritual research, strives to take a close look at what a person acquires in memory. And so, in the end, memory turns out to be what can be deepened. Today, as a few days ago, I do not wish to delve into deep philosophical or epistemological discussions, but to remain with popular consciousness. Such discussions could be made, but what is meant from the point of view under discussion here will be best understood if I stick to the popular.

What lives in our memory, what makes our personality complete, so that we are able at any moment to conjure up before our eyes what we have been through, is indeed brought into the human soul through impressions from the outside world. They are sensory impressions that we absorb and process with our ideas, and which change in the human being in an unknown way and then come up again; they come up of their own accord or with effort, when the person needs them, and are brought up by the person from the soul. And if we want to visualize what actually lives in the memory for the human soul, we can come to no other conclusion than to say to ourselves: It is like something that is reflected from the mirror of the soul, which lies deep and forever in our human being, even if it is after a long time. The external world is reflected in our soul because we have memory, because we have the ability to remember. And as I said, even if I am not immediately able to explain the nature of this mirror of the soul due to the limited time and circumstances, the image will suffice for our understanding. We do not get to the bottom of the essence of our soul with our memory. Just as when we have a mirror before us, we see what is in front of the mirror, so memory, in the mystically evoked images, offers us nothing other than the reflection of the outer world. If one wants to see what is behind the mirror, then the mirror must either be removed or the mirror must be smashed. In a sense, we have to break through this inner mirror, this power of memory within us, in order to look deeper into our being. And we break through this soul mirror, that is, we go even deeper into the human being through that which this mirror allows us to see as mysticism, when we inwardly bring our thinking, which we otherwise allow to be stimulated by experiments, into activity, when we meditate and concentrate on a particular thought content, repeatedly strengthening the soul forces.

I described it in detail in my Urania lecture and discussed it in my books: how, through a special activity of thinking, we can go below the memory level and look more deeply into our being. One might assume that we would then see what our physical organization is. For there is no doubt that, for ordinary consciousness, we only penetrate to the memory mirror in our soul, and in doing so, the processes of the physical organization change the image from the outside, which we see in the soul mirror, into a distorted image. But if we create an ever more activated thinking, with which we live inwardly as with our blood and our breath, so that our whole being participates in this inwardly living thinking, we penetrate deeper into our human nature, then not a physical human being is revealed to us, but a spiritual-soul being, which can only be revealed to us through this strengthened thinking. Then that in man reveals itself to us which is entirely of a spiritual-soul nature, which remains unconscious to consciousness, but which, by its own nature, shows that it was present before man, through birth, even through conception, entered upon his earthly existence.

That this can be the case can be understood when we consider how memory, through its own content, indicates to us that we are not dealing with the presentation of a present event, but with a past one. We have the same certainty about the character of our experience when we approach the event that characterizes us, which leads us deeper than mystical contemplation. Then we gain a mental picture of all that is actually creative in that first epoch of man's life, in which such a wonderful plastic activity is carried out on the sensory nervous system, on the brain and on the rest of the human organization. But through such contemplation we follow the human soul-spiritual being beyond birth and death; we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual-soul human beings with our core being before we descended into this earthly world and clothed ourselves with what our ancestors gave us, with a physical human body.

It is certainly the case that one comes to this view not only through that nebulous gift of man that is today called “clairvoyance”. Even if one uses the word “clairvoyance” for what I have just spoken of, one must address this as exact clairvoyance. For the one who sets out on the path of spiritual research like an exact scientist activates thinking in such a way that this thinking brings forth from the human being not only the memory images, but also things that lie below the ability to remember, that were creatively in the human being before the ability to remember had developed, before the human being began his earthly existence.

This is one side of the coin that anthroposophical research turns to when faced with the two principles characterized. It seeks to deepen the spiritual through exact thought processing and, on one side, goes beyond birth to the realization of the eternal essence of the human being. But just as one must recognize how the mystic develops what he so beautifully calls his contemplation, which leads him to illusions, how one must recognize this if one wants to arrive at a scientific knowledge and not stop at the points where the mystic , how one must strive for knowledge of the prenatal human being in the continuation of the mystical, and on the other hand, one must try to take a further step in spiritual knowledge by deepening scientific research. And that arises in the following way.

Yes, we come up against limits, especially when we honestly apply scientific methods to the world; we come up against limits when we apply them to natural processes in a real way. We come up against limits that we formulate in the concept of “material consciousness” and so on. But it is one thing to recognize these limitations and to say, “The human being cannot go beyond these limits”, and to have to reassure oneself, or to begin to struggle with all of one's humanity precisely at these limits, saying, “Perhaps these limits arise from the fact that one limiting the abilities one has within oneself here in order to perfect natural science – but then, if one continues to struggle, using one's full human abilities to struggle with these ideas, which will then gain boundaries; perhaps then one will go beyond these boundaries. I know that an objection can easily be raised; people will say: Yes, it is so good, so beneficial that science has understood how to exclude the human element from scientific methods, to stick to measuring, counting, the results of the scales, and so on, in other words, to separate what is known as research methods, what is recognized, from the human being. It is dangerous to mix people back in.

If you do this in the way that anthroposophical research wants, namely that you first stand on the point of view of science, that you have fully mastered the objective detachment of research methods from the human being and have introduced personal struggle into the detached, then something else comes out. Then you respect the demands of natural science and at the same time you introduce the human element into the objectivity of natural science. And here one must say: if you have absorbed yourself in the knowledge of the natural sciences of the last few centuries, especially the nineteenth century, so that you have, so to speak, completely imbued yourself with the spirit of the natural sciences, and can one still give oneself with one's whole personality, precisely to the things that science describes, then a gift of human nature, which is otherwise not at all regarded as a power of knowledge, becomes a power of knowledge. This devotion to something that is attained as something objective ultimately also becomes an objective expression of human love. When one can express this way of thinking with full respect for the scientific way of thinking, after having surveyed the phenomena of the world from a scientific point of view as far as possible, when one musters enough heroism in research to immerse oneself in what is scientifically given with such devotion, as one otherwise only immerses oneself when one develops love in the world, especially human love, then love itself becomes knowledge, and then, with the love that has undergone the metamorphosis to become the power of knowledge, one penetrates behind what science is able to give.

This is the work not of a day, but of long epochs of human life, to penetrate to those entities that lie beyond the boundaries of science. But what then emerges is the following: At the moment when one breaks through those boundaries, as it were, and looks behind the scenes that are erected by scientific knowledge, something about the human being himself becomes strangely transparent, which previously always remained opaque: we wake up in the morning, spend our day with a waking consciousness out of the forces of our earthly feelings and our soul, we fall asleep in the evening. What happens to the soul and spirit in the physical and bodily is beyond human consciousness. What plays into human life are confused dreams without cognitive value. So that we can say: the entire development of human life consists of what we live through while awake and what we spend while sleeping. And we do not pay attention to the fact that when we look back, we always piece together the morning and the evening, and let that fall out of consciousness that we cannot reach with it, that withdraws from consciousness, that we switch off the stretches that we have slept through. Now the question arises as to whether what sleep gives us spiritually and mentally is not just as important as what being awake gives us.

Of course, only being awake can be considered for our outer life, and the more civilization has turned to mere observation of the outer life, the more it relies on observing the waking state. But for the life of the human being itself – something that even level-headed philosophers have already conceded – what happens in the abundant third of life on earth that we sleep through is no less essential than what we experience while awake. But it only becomes vividly apparent when we have broken through the boundaries defining things through the struggle with nature through ultimate perceptions. Then it happens that the empty space of experience, which we otherwise sleep through, which otherwise contains nothing for us except dreaming, that this empty space of knowledge is filled with content, that we learn to look at that which otherwise shrouds itself in the darkness of sleep. Just as we can look back on what presents itself in waking life as the knowledge that we, as physical-sensory human beings, have experienced with the earth and its phenomena, so now knowledge of a spiritual-soul nature arises from the state in which the human being finds himself from falling asleep to waking up. The darkness between falling asleep and waking up is illuminated, this third of our life becomes transparent to us, and what we see is then our true self, the form of thinking, feeling and willing. We see that which, without our consciousness knowing it, is constantly at work within us, shaping our spiritual and psychological being. We see through to the content as that which is separated from us by the gate of death when we lay down the physical body. As sleep becomes transparent to us, we learn to recognize the true nature of human immortality. When we look beyond the mystical, when we go further than ordinary mysticism, we get to know the prenatal nature of the human being when we take natural science seriously, but when we begin to struggle at the boundary, we get to know what immortal existence the human being carries within. And so, for us, the human being comes together in its development, in that we see, so to speak, how a prenatal human being enters into the physical human organization, I would even say becomes more and more absorbed in this physical human organization, how the physical human organization becomes more and more becomes mightier and mightier, how that which has entered into the human being through birth, in the physical human existence, fades more and more in the further development of the human being, how, so to speak, the human being from this side becomes more and more a physical-bodily being. But in the same measure as this development proceeds, in the same measure as the spirit and soul that are innate in us submerge in the physical body, so that which appears to us, when we observe sleep, as the future being of the human being emerges.

As we look more and more towards the end of the normal human life, we see how, on the other hand, the spiritual-soul being of the spiritual post-mortal human existence emerges in contrast to the dying spiritual human life of prenatal existence. In every moment of earthly life we see a measure of what the human being has brought with them from the eternal worlds into earthly existence, what they are forging in order to carry it through the gateway of death into a spiritual world; cognitively we advance to immortality. The path I am describing to you, in order to arrive at an understanding of the human being by going beyond mysticism and natural science, is not one that can be dismissed by casually labeling it “clairvoyant.” This is a path in which one knows how each step follows the previous one, just as the mathematician knows how one mathematical derivation follows another. The path that I have been able to sketch for you – with reference to the books mentioned – is the path of anthroposophy, the path that leads to the unborn and immortal nature of the human soul in a way that could be explained to a strict mathematician, and which shows how one does not have to stop at the world in order to penetrate into the human being, as one does not have to stop at the human being in mysticism in order to penetrate into the world, but how one can connect the knowledge of the world with the knowledge of the human being. If enough natural science and enough mysticism is pursued in this way, then the possibility will arise for the future spiritual civilization of humanity to fulfill the word that approaches man so powerfully admonishing, the word “know thyself!”

Such knowledge as I have just described, however, differs from the knowledge that is bound to the nervous system, which is essentially knowledge of the head. And allow me to make a personal remark, which is, however, completely factual. As a spiritual researcher trying to penetrate this realm, which I call the realms that one has to pass through before birth and after death, one is aware that you cannot get by with the thinking that otherwise serves you in life. You have to develop a strengthened thinking that engages the whole person. One does not become a medium through this, but the whole human being must be taken up by such thinking. Such thinking penetrates into feeling, into emotion, and even demands that the human being surrender himself to it with the whole content of his will. At the same time, thinking about spiritual content is such that it cannot be incorporated into the memory in the usual way, like any other. Here too I would like to make a personal comment: You see, when a spiritual researcher gives a lecture like the one I am giving here, he cannot prepare it in the same way as other scientific lectures. In that case he would only appeal to memory. But what has come about through such a deepening cannot be assimilated by memory, it must be experienced again and again in every moment. It can be brought down into those regions where we put our knowledge into words, but one must endeavor to do so with one's whole being. And that is why I have a profound experience of only being able to incorporate into human language that which I succeed in researching in the spiritual world. And by incorporating it into human language, it also becomes incorporated into memory; I only succeed when I draw or write down a few lines, so that not only the head but also all the other organ systems are involved. You have to feel the need to take one or the other to help you, because you can't manage it, it fluctuates when you want to grasp it with your head. The important thing is that I express the thought with lines and thus fix it. So you can find whole truckloads of old notebooks of mine that I never look at again. They are not there for that either, but so that what I have laboriously extracted from my mind can be developed to the point where it can be clothed in words and thus brought to the memory. Once it has been written, one has participated in the spiritual production with something else in one's organism than merely with the head, with thoughts, then one is able to hold on to that which wants to escape. The rest of the human organization is initially uninvolved, unconsciously more dormant than the mental processes, and when we incorporate something into our will, we make use of those organs that are in a state that we describe as dormant when we are awake. We are actually only awake in our thoughts and imagination, for the way in which our mental images penetrate into our organism as a volitional decision, to become a movement of the hand or fingers, remains completely shrouded in darkness in ordinary consciousness. Only the spiritual researcher will recognize what happens between the process in the brain and the movement. And so spiritual knowledge, which is not ordinary head knowledge, is entrusted to the whole human organization. By acquiring knowledge of the human being from within the whole human being, one is able to apply this knowledge of the human being, which can take the prenatal and the after-death as a tangible reality, to practical life in a completely different way than one would be able to without this true knowledge of the human being.

Now those who are grounded in anthroposophical research dare, I would say, through a twist of fate that also extends to the other areas of human education, pedagogy and didactics, to introduce human education into practical life. Those who imbibe the knowledge of the human being that has been brought forth from such research as I have mentioned acquire a more refined instinct, a spiritualized instinct, for everything that develops in the human being through the different ages from birth to death. We must then only have the courage to look at human development, the knowledge of which we need, at a higher level, in the same way as we otherwise look at anything with strict scientific methods that lies within the scientific world.

For example, the following arises: We are always thinking about what the effect of the soul and spirit on the physical body of the human being might actually be. But we do not consider that we should not apply the methods of speculation to such questions, but should also apply the methods of observation to such questions. When real observation of human beings is developed humanely, then we see – I am speaking from a popular point of view – how in the first age of the child, from birth to the change of teeth, in a wonderful way the most significant abilities of the human being emerge from the indeterminate depths of his being. We see how the dynamic develops through which the human being, as an upright creature, places himself in the world in his balance, how speech and thought emerge from the depths of the soul and are physically realized. But what we see culminates organically in the change of teeth. This has the peculiarity of being a unique event in human life. What happens during the change of teeth does not repeat itself. In a sense, a conclusion is made with a sum of forces in the human organization. Only someone who does not know this human organization can believe that the change of teeth stands alone. No, it does not stand alone, it stands as the outwardly perceptible expression of what is going on in the whole human organism. The human being is going through something that he will no longer go through in later life, otherwise he would always change his teeth in a periodic sequence. But those who observe the human being are aware of this significant transformation of the spiritual and psychological nature of the human being But this change, which takes place during this epoch of the human being's life, is not observed. If I were to present what educators and didacticians should know, what underlies the human knowledge I want to talk about here, it would go far beyond the scope of a lecture, and so I will just sketch it out.

Take memory, for example. On superficial examination, we say that memory behaves in a certain way up to the change of teeth, then it changes somewhat. But it is something different, the memory before the change of teeth and the memory after the change of teeth. Today, due to our scientific attitude, we do not have the right talent for observation for such intimate expressions of human nature. For a correct observation, it can be seen that the wonderful memory before the change of teeth is nothing more than the completion of habits expressed from within. From the forces of habit, memory is built up until the teeth change. If it is a memory that can be compared to a habitual movement, then one can say that for memory one image follows another.

In short, what we call memory undergoes a metamorphosis when children change teeth around the age of seven. It undergoes a metamorphosis from more physical-bodily experience to spiritual-soul experience. Once one begins with such an observation, further ones arise that are tremendously characteristic of the further development of the human being. For example, when one has acquired the instinct of observation, when one has assimilated the knowledge of spiritual research, one sees that the child, up to the change of teeth, is an imitative being. Of course, one must not take such things crudely, but the child in the first period of life is, so to speak, one single large sense organ. We can compare the whole life of the child in the first period with a single sense organ, we can compare it with the internal organization of the eye. Just as the eye takes in the external world and, through the application of willpower, builds up the image of what is impressed upon the eye organ through the agency of the organic within, so the child is constantly striving to reproduce what is present in its environment through imitation, which emerges from the inner being. The child is entirely sensory organ, entirely active sensory organ. Because the whole being of the child functions as a sense organ, the child not only imitates and inwardly experiences, in a dreamy state, quite unconsciously, what is external movement, gesture, what is speech sound, what is thought in speech sound, but it always arises - and this is the peculiar thing - from this starting point: the imitative child observes the moral significance of the gestures of father and mother. The moral significance of facial expression, for example, finds its counterpart in the child's sense of it; it becomes ingrained in the child, in its physical organization. The child organizes itself right down to the cellular level by empathizing with what is happening in its environment. Only when we consider the implications of this will we be able to distinguish between what is inherited and what is acquired in this way during the first childhood epoch through imitation from the environment. Then we will see the wonderful interaction between the environment and the child, and the real, for the sober-minded observer mystical, concept of the science of heredity will be able to be placed on a completely different footing. But it also shows the special nature that the human being brings with them, in that they enter earthly existence as spiritual-soul beings with an etheric body, which is something that is unfamiliar to today's way of thinking. What characterizes the child is a bodily-religious being. It is actually the case that the child is given over with its body to the physical outer world and its moral content, just as we can be given over in a religious mood to something that reveals itself to us as divine. It is in a bodily-religious mood; because this mood is purely bodily-religious, it does not, of course, have the mood of piety and similar states that later become mental religiosity. But if we follow the development of the human being, we see how what remains in the body until the teeth change then appears differently, how what is completely contained in the bodily-physical in the first epoch moves into impulses of feeling and will. And when we send our children to primary school, we must realize that the inner life of the child undergoes a metamorphosis. After the final point mentioned, which is the change of teeth, what was physical experience is partially left behind in the physical development and appears in a different form as soul and feeling. That which was first in the growth forces, in the plastic formative forces, that which has worked in the body as spiritual-soul during the change of teeth, part of this detaches itself and transforms into the free soul-spiritual after the change of teeth. And what we call growth, what has been working in the body, gradually transforms into the spiritual-soul. If we pay attention to this and are equipped with this knowledge, then we as teachers and educators face the child to be educated with our whole attitude and all our knowledge in the right way. Then we know that in this physical, bodily, sensual being, which is in a religious mood of devotion to its environment, as it grows into a bodily-religious being, the spiritual-soul being that was there in the pre-earthly existence. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of an educator who is confronted with the child in this way. He will be aware of his responsibility, he knows that the spiritual worlds have sent him to guide a being that he has to guess at and unravel through its physical expressions. He will stand before the being in such a way that he devotes himself to helping everything that the child has brought with it from the spiritual and soul worlds to truly come to manifestation. And with reverence for his calling, the educator will stand before the child, seeing with each month, with each year, that all that it has brought with it from the spiritual and soul world is transformed into the physical and bodily. And he will observe the way in which he can influence the child, and he will be able to perceive what was bodily-physical before the transformation, in the first epoch until the change of teeth; in the second epoch, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it transforms itself as a transition into the soul, and only with sexual maturity does it transform itself into the spiritual. The human being then presents himself to us in such a way that what has been experienced in his organization in the first years of childhood now comes to expression in his spiritual grasp of the world: the bodily-religious becomes spiritual-religious. Now we can see the connection between what is physical and what becomes soul and spirit. Now we no longer speculate about the physical and bodily, about spirit and soul; now we see how, in the different ages of life in human development, the spiritual and soul-like is directly revealed. Now we gain an understanding of the human being based on the interaction between body and soul, on the basis of observing human beings, which becomes the basis for proper human education.

By the will of fate, the opportunity arose to apply what results from such observation in a practical, didactic and pedagogical way in the years when one is able to guide the destiny of the child. In Stuttgart, Mr. Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School as a free elementary school, to which the lower classes of the middle school were later added. The leadership was given to me. I was now able to apply the methods that result from the human knowledge described above. The aim is to initially leave aside what is otherwise called the “teaching goal”, and to read this from the human development itself.

What I have described is only a rough sketch, but it can be observed from day to day in a new form in the child through the pedagogical instinct that arises from working with the child. Through this, one can see how the child's life unfolds; one can see what dictates what you, as an educator, should bring to the child each week, each month, and that you let the human being's inner being dictate what you, as an educator, should bring to the child. For example, when you first send your child to primary school, it is only natural that he or she should have an aversion to learning to read and write. And that is understandable. Consider that these strange signs, which we call letters and by which we read and write, which are something completely foreign to the human being, have emerged from the original characters in a long cultural development. The original writing emerged from the images and signs of what it represented; it was even closer in expression to what it meant; it was still similar to what one perceived directly. The child who comes to school and is supposed to learn the derived characters feels no affinity with the characters that are foreign to his or her perception. This understanding only awakens with sexual maturity and is quite different from that between the sixth and eighth years and between the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth years of life. The child, because it is only there emotionally, relies on the pictorial, which presents itself to it in the same way as sensory perception and sensory vision. If we recognize this, then we will introduce the right educational impulses for this age; but then we must move on to those things that we have introduced in our school in Stuttgart. The aim is to bring the child to a stage where they can draw by painting and paint by drawing. They should not be engaged only with their heads and eyes, but with their whole being. It is amazing what emerges in terms of pictorial quality when children draw and paint. If this is properly directed, it is possible to develop the letters, writing and reading from what is close to the children. We learn to read after learning to write because reading only involves the head, whereas writing involves the whole person.

This is an example of how we try to achieve, through practical pedagogy and didactics, what human education should achieve, based on knowledge of the human being. The person who looks at how the human being is predisposed in terms of their religious life will also find the opportunity to bring in the moral-religious impulses. In this way, the following is revealed: It is remarkable how children between the ages of nine and ten, in the first third of the second stage of life, go through something like this in this stage of life. All this takes place unconsciously. We see how the child, having changed teeth, makes the transition from being an imitative being to one who, in response to the authority of the educator and teacher, acquires everything. You will believe the person who wrote the “Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago when he says that he does not approach you as an advocate for authority, but precisely when you have recognized from that “Philosophy of Freedom” what freedom means , then one can also appreciate that it is out of the lawfulness of the human being that the child, from the change of teeth to the time of sexual maturity, is a being that completely imitates what it sees in its teacher or educator. We see that the child not only wants to model itself on the teacher or educator through language, in accordance with its own inner laws, but that it wants to model itself on the whole of human life. When the child has become immersed in this necessary, self-evident sense of authority, we see how it undergoes a kind of crisis between the ages of nine and ten. Everything happens emotionally and intuitively, the child does not give it any thought, but it approaches the teacher and wants something special. And if we want to put it into words, the child thinks: Until now, the beautiful was beautiful because the teacher and educator thought it was beautiful, until now the true was true because the teacher and educator thought it was true. But from this point on, the child feels: Who justifies this authority before the whole world, where did it get the true and the beautiful as true and beautiful? The child is going through a crisis, it knows nothing of what I have formulated here, it only senses something. And we, as teachers and educators, must observe this moment so that the right word can be spoken from the educator to the child, over and over again, if necessary. For it is a matter of the fact that our actions in this moment of crisis determine the whole of later life, whether it is full of joie de vivre and security or is alienated and inwardly paralyzed.

An educational method of this kind shows us that we, as educators, must do what is beneficial for life as a whole. If we enter into such a study of life, we will see how something that is properly introduced into a child at an early age only comes to fruition in later life. I will give you an example here. We know people who, when they get older, perhaps when they are very old and enter into some society, they do not need to say much, they are something that brings calm, peace, something that blesses into society. These are people who, often only through the nuance of their words, through the way they speak, can have a magnificent effect on their fellow world, with moral impulses, dispensing grace. If we are not satisfied with observing life in shorter periods, and if we make the effort and are able to observe the whole of human life, then we know that such people, who bring such blessings, had the good fortune as children to look up in adoration to other people or to something that was shown to them. From this veneration between the ages of ten and fourteen develops that which makes us benefactors in later life, which, figuratively speaking, I want to say: No hand can rise in blessing in later life that has not learned to fold in prayer in childhood. This is just a pictorial way of indicating how a true knowledge of the human being brings such things to the child that the feeling for moral good and the antipathy for evil grow and live, that they grow as the human body itself grows. One has the feeling that if one brings sharp contours into definitions to the child, it would be as if one were to shackle the child's organism. We must give the child concepts and impulses that can grow like the organism, that can grow spiritually and soulfully, that spiritually carry within them the inner possibility of becoming ever richer and richer, so that later one can look back with joy in one's memory that the child's life has sprouted in the aged human body. I would like to show you with a few pictures how a real knowledge of the human being, gained in the way I described at the beginning of my lecture, can be applied to the education and development of the child. You will see in the Stuttgart School how it will have to prove to you what I have described to you here, how it provides, so to speak, the practical proof of life that exists to a certain degree, even if we want to be modest about the results.

It could now be objected that only those who have undergone what qualifies them to look into the spiritual world can have an interest in such knowledge of man. But it is not so. Although anyone who has gone through the path of knowledge, as described for example in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” can verify for themselves what spiritual research says, this is not even necessary for judgment, just as anyone who is not a painter themselves can judge the beauty of a picture. Although only the researcher can describe the spiritual world, those who have retained a healthy sense of judgment can certainly see through the truth or untruth of what is being researched from the spiritual world. Therefore, those who profess this spiritual research should not be portrayed as a sect or as blind.

Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect; it wants to be a continuation of scientific research, which has developed over centuries to its culmination in the nineteenth century, and we are still in the process of developing it today. Only by following these guidelines can it become a true knowledge of the human being and thus the basis for an education that is appropriate for humanity and in keeping with human dignity. For it is not only through knowledge of the world that we can cope in life, since neither science nor mysticism can lead the human being to a full knowledge of his or her own humanity. For it is like breathing: there must be an interaction, a kind of inhalation and exhalation, between knowledge of the world and knowledge of the human being. But such knowledge alone can only be the basis for an education that pursues the spiritual and soul aspects of the human being until they are transformed into the physical and bodily aspects. It is the basis for that aspect of the state of human culture that needs to be transformed. For anyone who looks at today's life will be able to say to himself: This state cannot be transformed by external transformation, it cannot be brought about by it alone, what we desire for the continuation of our civilization, which is threatened, but only by that which comes from the spirit, and only those human deeds and actions that are borne by the spirit will fit in with social progress.

Let me summarize briefly: spiritual knowledge gives man, immersed in spirit, the ideas that can fill his whole being, that can lead to spirit-filled deeds, to spirit-filled actions and to a spirit-filled social, to a spiritual human coexistence steeped in love. And that is what we will most urgently need in the near future.

Theosophy or spiritual science approaches man primarily by giving him messages about a transcendent world, certain knowledge of what has existed in the invisible world since primeval times, since the first beginnings of being, hidden behind our world of the senses.

At first, Theosophy seems to be just a theory, like many others. But if we immerse ourselves in it, even if only for a short time, it is no longer just a theory; it becomes an act, a reality for those who deal with it, it becomes truth, wisdom and wealth through life.

It becomes all this not only because it brings great ideals of the future development of man before the soul, but also because it is possible right from the beginning, before the great ideals have been realized, to mean something for the soul, to give our whole life a turn.

A great, all-encompassing ideal that Theosophy develops before man is that everyone is able to develop the powers and abilities that lie dormant in them, so that - even if only in the distant future - it will be possible for them to see into the spiritual world that Theosophy speaks of, just as they look into our sensual world today. Yes, the moment will come, perhaps in the distant future, when the spiritual world will no longer be something hidden, unknown, mysterious to man, but will shine and radiate before his soul's gaze like the world of color and light for someone who was blind from birth and suddenly sees after an operation.

This awakening to spiritual life, the inclusion of the spiritual world in the field of human experience, that lofty ideal of which Theosophy speaks, gives man hope, indeed certainty, that he will achieve it one day. There is already something in it that is of great wealth for the human soul, something that gives man strength and certainty for his whole life. For many, however, for most people, it is still a distant ideal.

Nevertheless, regardless of this distant ideal, Theosophy can offer people something else, even if they feel far from this ideal.

The great truths about the supersensible worlds, which are offered to humanity by advanced individuals to whom these worlds are already open today, are different from other theories in that they show man the way to understand everyday phenomena and experiences in our lives. These are messages that explain the most important manifestations of life and give us the solution to the darkest secrets of nature and man.

To acquire such knowledge is to gain strength for life. For not understanding what is mysterious in human life means restlessness, weakness, inability to live; on the other hand, every understanding of the essence and purpose of life gives man strength, confidence and hope that will not leave him even in the most difficult moments, when he needs them most.

This eminently practical significance of Theosophy appears most clearly to us when we turn to the question that today's lecture is specifically about, namely the mystery of man and woman and their connection with the child. Indeed, this is a vital topic because we cannot take a step in our lives without encountering this question.

It is true that modern science, which is worthy of all admiration, provides a large number of answers to this question. However, this science, based on the observation of what the physical eye sees, what the physical apparatus shows and what reason combines into a logical whole, relies only on external observation and the conclusions derived from it – science inevitably fails precisely where we encounter such questions and mysteries of daily life.

It is enough to look at contemporary literature: we find here that today's literature, which knows nothing of spiritual science, takes a twofold view of such an important problem as today's.

On the one hand, we see a materialistic view flashing through some of these remarks, expressing a wide range of assumptions about the nature of man and woman. On the other hand, however, we see a whole series of serious and thinking people who are not at all satisfied with the vague assumptions, who sense a deeper nature of the contradiction between man and woman; these people find nothing but a one-sided and chaotic view in modern science and literature; but they are not yet able to penetrate to spiritual science and there to the right enlightenment of this mystery. Let us take a look at some of the views on this subject. How confused human knowledge is precisely here!

The writer Rosa Mayreder, who dealt with this question but did not yet penetrate into spiritual science, has collected some opinions that are common today in all cultural countries, especially about women.

An overview of these different opinions casts a sharp light on the utter confusion of the present day. Let's look at how the writer compares different views. The book by the aforementioned author, “On the Problem of Women”, also deserves to be read for other reasons, because it leads to theosophy, as it were, and to the gate of theosophy, although she herself has not yet entered it. Here we can see how a great naturalist, who is often mentioned, tries to grasp and summarize the nature of women in that he ascribes tenderness to them. Another scientist – his name is not important – summarizes all of a woman's qualities in the concept of devotion. Elsewhere, we see again the human being who has grown out of the present day, who hopes to express the essence of a woman best with the word 'temperance in the face of anger'.

So one person comes up with the idea of tenderness, another just as sincerely and honestly with the concept of devotion, and yet another, based on his observations, with the term “anger-bearing”. Another judgment, again based on a man who often dealt with psychopathology, calls woman “embodied conservatism”. A conservative element in social life, that is what woman is supposed to be. We don't have to go far to find the opposite view: “The real revolutionary element lies in the nature of woman”.

We have a whole range of such views. Their enormous diversity, indeed their contradictions, are proof of how little people understand these things if they stick to superficial observation.

A profound philosophical thinker, on the other hand, tries to divide humanity into, on the one hand, analytically thinking people who analyze, break down, classify and penetrate into the details of everything they see, and, on the other hand, people who, in turn, understand the whole universe synthetically – and then calls the woman an analytical being and man a synthetic being; but immediately we come across the statement of another philosopher who explains that woman is always ready for synthesis, but only man is supposedly capable of the strict analytical knowledge that leads to science.

All these thinkers, whose views have been cited here, simply stopped at superficial, superficial observation; hence the confusion and contradictions in these various statements.

Nevertheless, it can be said that there is something in the way this question is approached that drives modern science along the path that it must follow in the course of time to the recognition of spiritual life, to the recognition of that which lies beyond the visible world of modern science.

In a particularly remarkable way, the young, unhappy doctor Dr. Otto Weininger summarized his views in his book “Sex and Character”, a book that shows on one hand how modern materialistic science is driven by inner necessity to higher knowledge, but on the other hand how this science is not able to find a final solution to this question because of its prejudices and the nature of its methods.

Weininger builds on the ground of serious and exact science, on the methods of modern research, that there is a kind of polarity in the male and female sex, a kind of ideal male and female type, but that we never encounter it in practice, because in fact one always finds in the individual, both in the man a hidden female and in the woman a hidden male part. Weininger, however, puts this whole thing on a materialistic basis. He almost gives the impression that a part of male substance is mixed into the female organic substance and vice versa.

In other cases, too, we find in Weininger, alongside ideas that lead to true knowledge, a wide range of completely false ideas and conclusions. In general, this book shows a wondrous mixture of deep ideas and, again, the most extreme prejudices against the nature of women. This can be seen best in the conclusions, where Weininger comes to the final view that a woman has neither freedom nor individuality nor intellect nor reason.

These different views about women, full of contradictions, are able to evoke a sympathetic response in the human heart, in the sense that one recognizes the need to look not only at the observation of life through the external senses , but also on the inner, spiritual events; only if we see man and woman not only as they appear to our eyes, but if we delve into the inner being of man, can we recognize the true nature, origin and laws of the two sexes of man.

Other lectures have shown that we can become aware of the invisible parts of the human being on the basis of the great problems of waking and sleeping, life and death.

It was shown how the whole world accessible to our senses, which extends around us during the daytime while we are awake, and all of our waking consciousness sinks into an indeterminate darkness in the evening as we fall asleep; and that then, in the morning when we wake up, everything that was spread out before our consciousness the previous evening emerges again from the darkness of the unconscious. It is a common phenomenon, and yet – perhaps for that very reason – this principle has not been sufficiently investigated, although it is one of the deepest, most enigmatic questions of life, one that, when seriously confronted with it, can lead a person to a deep realization.

According to the experiences of those who have developed higher abilities, it can be observed that, in the evening, when falling asleep, a person leaves part of their being in bed, while the other part leaves the physical body and then lives with it during the time of sleep in the other, transcendent world.

But why can't the person, with that part that is drawn out of the physical body at night, perceive the phenomena of this higher, transcendental world with full consciousness?

Because it is only possible to perceive where there are sensory organs. Only the world for which there are senses can be perceived. In this soul-spiritual part of the human being, which emerges from the physical body during sleep, no organs have yet developed in the ordinary person today.

For this reason, from the moment of falling asleep until waking up, man is [deaf and] blind to everything that happens in this higher world, in which he would live if he were not relegated today to the purely sensual world, in which alone he has a developed perceptual apparatus and to which his soul-spiritual part always returns in the morning when he is reintegrated into his physical body.

We can go further and point out another circumstance that leads us to a real observation of spiritual science. In what lies on the bed during sleep, we can observe two things; the one part, the physical body, can be perceived through the sense of touch in the sleeping person; it consists of the same forces as a stone, and is therefore of a mineral nature.

This physical body would disintegrate into its own forces and substances if it were not permeated by a principle that saturates it with life force, the so-called life body or etheric body.

Everything that is alive must constantly conquer life. The stone is sustained by its mineral forces; only from outside can the disturbing forces come that destroy it. But the living body only persists if it is maintained by the power of life; left to itself, it decomposes under the influence of mineral forces into the individual substances of which it is composed, and becomes a corpse.

Between birth and death, the physical body of man is intertwined with the etheric body. At death, however, this etheric body emerges with the astral body, leaving the physical body dead. This is the difference between sleep and death. In sleep, the physical and etheric bodies remain together, but at death, the etheric body also withdraws with the astral body and the higher principles of the human being, while the physical body, left to itself, becomes a corpse. What interests us most about this matter today is that at night, when a person is in the spiritual world, they are almost purely spiritual, or, to put it another way, a soul-spiritual being that consists of the astral body and the human “I”.

The organs that a person uses during the day when they are awake, when they are in their physical shell, are in the physical and etheric body for the purpose of contact with the outside world. Thus, we only understand the essence of a person correctly if we observe their changing states during the day and night.

The human being is in a similar situation with regard to gender. The conditions that we summarize under the concept of man and woman are only found in the part of the human being that remains on the bed at night as a physical and etheric body. That which withdraws from them during sleep – the astral body and the human being's “I” – and returns to them in the morning, has no gender. What flows out of the body at night is the human being elevated beyond gender.

So when the human being leaves the body, they leave the entire realm of gender; then in the morning, when they awaken, they return and enter gender again.

Only the physical and etheric bodies appear to be sexual to us and show us this in a wonderful way.

Theosophy gives us this special knowledge, wonderful and incredible, but true! Only on the outside is a person a member of the sex that can be observed through the senses. But if we observe the supersensible part of what remains on the bed during sleep, namely the life body or etheric body, this body shows us something surprising compared to the physical body. The etheric body is actually endowed with the opposite sex as the physical body; the etheric body of a man is of the female sex and the etheric body of a woman is of the male sex.

Here is the key to the mystery of sex! The human being consists of a physical, etheric and astral body and the I (ego); the ego and the astral body are trans-sexual and therefore do not participate in the sexual, except that they surround themselves with the etheric and physical body.

Of the physical and etheric body, we see with the ordinary senses alone the physical body; but if we turn our attention inwards to the supersensible side, the etheric body, we find the opposite sex. When a person observes life from the perspective of the sexes, when a man or a woman experiences life and tries to understand it from that point of view, but spiritual science then provides him with such insights as the opposite natures of the sexes of the physical and etheric bodies, then the scales fall from the eyes of man; only then does it become clear to him when he looks at life as a man, that although external nature stimulates him to male deeds, he harmonizes these male qualities, balances them with other, almost female qualities. Likewise, women show us a whole range of male traits. We then find that there is nothing that we could ascribe to only the man or only the woman, whether as a virtue or a defect, that is tied only to one sex.

If we look at Weininger's opinion from this point of view, we see a certain similarity, but it is certainly not material things in men and women of the opposite sex, but this has its seat in the etheric body.

Why are those people who rely on external impressions so wrong in their opinions about women and men? Precisely because they judge spiritual life by external signs of gender and forget that there is something feminine in every man and something masculine in every woman and therefore there is always something of the opposite sex in each sex that complements it.

In all the above characterizations of woman, where the concept of “tenderness”, “fidelity”, “poisonousness”, “conservatism” or “the revolutionary element in man” was attributed to woman, we see everywhere that only what was found from the outer senses was judged.

Let us look deeper! Theosophy sheds light on these things, teaching us to understand the sphere in which masculinity and femininity meet. There, where man is elevated above material life, as for example in sleep, there is no gender in its meaning. But it would be wrong to judge that the contradiction that arises in both sexes has only a meaning for the physical world. On the contrary, we must become fully and earnestly aware of the nature of the physical world, according to Goethe's saying: “Everything transitory is only a parable”: everything physical is only a parable of the spiritual!

When we reflect on this sexual difference, we shall understand the true nature of it. We know this difference only in the physical world, as the polarity between man and woman. However, the difference is only the expression of a much deeper antagonism in the spiritual world. Two manifestations go hand in hand with life, two extremes that we commonly call life and death.

In outer life, the picture of this contradiction can be beautifully observed in the growing tree. On the surface, we see the bark that has imprisoned the inner life, which has stepped back from the surface. Inside, however, we see abundant life, streams of sap rising from the trunk to all the branches, strengthening them and nourishing the leaves, flowers and fruits. Inside, a tree is full of life, but it is covered by a solid shell. And yet this tree needs to be trapped in the solid bark, for how could a tree that was deprived of the bark that seemingly imprisons its life survive the winter, survive storms and tempests? A tree whose trunk is wounded, whose bark is stripped, dies.

Similarly, all of life is permeated by the opposition between life and form.

What is inside the tree wants to grow and flourish, but it is held back by the fact that it is enclosed in the form, which constantly opposes life as something oppressive and life-threatening; life itself would overflow and rush if it were not for death. Only form, which restrains and binds, creates the harmony and balance that life, progressing rapidly, strives for. The bark of a tree is precisely the image of that which limits, restrains, and kills.

Death and life, as the two opposites, intervene in all of life, in all events. We find life everywhere – and the form that life simultaneously retains and holds back, so that it does not rush, but also does not immediately disappear.

We can observe this phenomenon in artistic creation: in the beautiful products of Greek sculpture, where the knowing artist shows us the hidden secrets of the spiritual world in the image of the statue.

This is particularly evident in two works of Greek sculpture: the Head of Zeus, which shows us in a typical way how Zeus was viewed (original in the National Museum in Rome), and that of Juno (the so-called Juno Ludovisi). Two wonderful works of human creativity; anyone who looks at them, not thoughtlessly but more deeply, will notice the broad and flat forehead of Juno, which then suddenly falls back, and in contrast to it the narrow forehead of Zeus, rounded at the sides, whose arch slowly recedes at the temples.

If you look at the entire face of Zeus and Juno, and if you compare them, you will find that the face of Zeus awakens in you a feeling that if there were life in this statue, would change its entire expression in a short time, transform itself; in this face, an enormous life force develops, strong and abundant, which would be able to reshape the whole face within a short time.

It is different with Juno. The soul that resides in this being, captured by the artist in the expression of this statue, has embodied itself entirely in the form, becoming a beautiful and complete form. Here we feel the calm after creation, and we cannot imagine this face any differently; on the contrary, we feel that if this face lived before us for all eternity, it would not change its expression. In Zeus, only a moment of what is happening in this soul is captured in the face, while in Juno we feel the calm of the soul, which has fully achieved its expression in the finished, completed form.

Here we see the complete contrast again: the life that would have brought death with it if it had been left to itself, because it would constantly have wiped out one form after another, it would not have tolerated a moment of consolidation in the form; this life on the one hand, on the other hand, the encapsulation of life, the crystallization, the preservation of the same in the frame, in the form.

As soon as you ascend from the physical world into the spiritual world, the difference between the sexes disappears, but we find there the contrast between the flowing, swirling life and that power that wants to hold back, crystallize the rushing life. And the manifestation of these two opposites of the spiritual world and their correspondence in physical life is precisely masculinity and femininity.

However, it should be noted here that the male and female cannot be determined by the external characteristics by which gender is determined in ordinary life, since part of the feminine is also contained in man, and vice versa.

The male pole is a manifestation of that which rushes forward and would soon develop too quickly; the manifestation of that abundant life which, left to itself, would not cease for a moment. By contrast, the female manifestation is that force in nature which holds back life, forcing it to pause, thus enabling its manifestation by allowing form to arise. Thus masculinity and femininity work together in nature, complementing each other.

The woman – the principle of form, the man – the principle of life.

If we can also bring what has been said here into our feelings, if it is not just a lifeless presentation of the dry intellect, then we will also understand the task of the sexes in nature and thus find the way to mutual understanding and to the understanding of the two sexes in human life.

This is precisely the great advantage of Theosophy: it provides practical solutions to the great questions of the human mind, and it points the way to a deeper understanding of these questions.

In a similar way, we also arrive at a solution to the relationship between man, woman and child...

It will not be difficult for us to understand the child's relationship to man and woman if we remember that even in sleep, what emerges from the physical principle as a spiritual part of the human being is sexless.

If we compare death to sleep, we come to understand the nature of the child.

What happens at death? — The etheric and astral bodies and the ego emerge from the physical body, which is handed over to the forces of the physical world.

The I is connected to the etheric body only for a short time, a few days at most; then the etheric body, especially that part of it that is the carrier of gender, is also separated, and a second, ethereal corpse is formed.

However, what is not sexual in the ethereal body continues with the other principles as an independent principle.

When the human being then enters into a new existence, the human germ descends from the supersensible worlds and leans down again in order to be reborn through man and woman.

Three are necessary if man is to enter physical life again: man and woman in the physical world and the human germ that leans towards them, which spent some time in the purely spiritual world, matured there and prepared for a new incarnation for a long time.

How does a person enter physical life?

Much thought has been given to what we in ordinary life call the love between man and woman. What a master of life one would have to be to fully understand the meaning of this word, which contains so many secrets! From the highest bliss to the most miserable humiliation, from the highest exaltation to the most terrible destruction of all life, all this is contained in the word 'love'.

All the profound thinkers who have reflected on love and its essence agree that there is something very intimate and delicate about it that lies beyond direct observation; in Schopenhauer we come across the direct statement that every action, every ignition of love between man and woman, has a special, individual character, so that a married couple can be together for many years, and yet every act of love, every conjugal approach is something special, new, individual.

Schopenhauer is right. What does this act of love mean, what happens in the love between man and woman? It is not only what lives in the “physical life” between the male and female individuals that plays a role, but something third also comes into play. There is always a human being in the higher world who enters into physical incarnation, and for this purpose love flares up between the two beings.

What we call love between hearts and hearts, this glowing feeling that connects two souls, is a reflection of that spiritual glowing cloud of love with which the ego, descending to birth, surrounds two beings, is this call to the man and the woman who can make it possible for this human being to enter into physical life.

The love itself that brings the sexes together does not come only from them, it is a shadow, a projection of a being that wants to embody itself.

This is how one must look at the individuality, the peculiarity of each act of love, because in each such union a human individuality wants to emerge through those whom it has chosen as its parents and educators.

In this way of looking at things, we learn to distinguish between what is individual and what is inherited. Since the father and mother are involved in reproduction, the male and female of the father and mother – their physical and etheric bodies – interbreed in various ways. However, what the human ego, which wants to embody itself, brings with it from the higher worlds and from its previous lives, appears to us as an individual aspect.

So you have to distinguish between what is individual and what is inherited from father and mother. We see this well in families where there are many children: What they have inherited from their father and mother appears in all children, but above all, we can observe something special and individual in each child, something that the spirit itself has brought with it, which is not in the father or mother, but which was already there in the human being before birth.

Then we can also correctly assess what has really been inherited from the nature of a parent and in what a wonderful way it happens. We learn why daughters so often take after their fathers and sons after their mothers, and why when reading biographies of great men we also study the characteristics and nature of their parents. On the other hand, we learn how that which is original in man plunges into the inherited shell and partially merges with it.

Nevertheless, we see how today's materialistic science repeatedly points out how often characteristics of parents and even spiritual qualities are inherited. We are often reminded how genius inherits its characteristics from parents and family. Here, too, only inherited characteristics are mentioned. A person's talent, it is said, the whole soul of a person consists of what has been accumulated over several generations. The highest peak, it is said, always comes at the end, because then we have a kind of accumulation. — That is a peculiar logic! A logically correct argument would have to lead here to the gates of spiritual science. This is where genius should begin. The fact that genius often stands at the end of many generations is unmistakable proof that this is not mere inheritance. That genius appears tinged with inheritance is no more surprising than that, to use a rather trivial comparison, if someone has fallen into water, they come out wet. But there is something that has accumulated over generations, but these are only the outer qualities, those shells that develop from generation to generation. These things must be considered in the right way, then the internally coherent, closed individuality presents itself to us, which finds its first expression in the feeling of love between the future parents as a foreshadowed shadow and is embodied in complete diversity and difference from what will be inherited.

Many people are afraid when they hear these teachings that the feeling of love for the children and parents could suffer in this way, could grow cold. But that is not right. On the contrary, this spiritual connection between parents and children would be further strengthened and intensified. Why should certain parents have this child in particular? Because it is this child that wants to go to these parents and be born with and from them.

Hence the individuality in the feelings of love, this dawn of love that precedes the birth of a child: love even precedes, even before birth the child loves the parents, even before sexual intercourse and conception by the mother, expressing to the parents that it wants to be born.

From this, we also see the necessity of the parents' love for their children, which is actually only the repayment of the love that the child already had for the parents before birth.

And so it is with many concepts that we encounter in everyday life and on which Theosophy, when we delve deeper into it, sheds an [ever] brighter light.

Here we see a wonderful harmony of this trinity in father, mother and child, which is the basis of life everywhere in nature and in humans. Here we encounter it in an extremely vivid and understandable form.

Man is the ever-flowing life, woman is the symbol of the form that receives and encloses this life and allows it to crystallize in beauty; these two principles then unite within each other, man and woman unite in love, to enable the descent of the spiritual being from the sexually neutral worlds to the form of the physical world, and thus to open with all their love this gate between the higher world, the spiritual world and the world of matter.

If, as already mentioned, such concepts do not remain dry abstractions for us, but we transform them into powerful impressions and feelings and then go out into life enriched by them, then we see how Theosophy explains and solves all the riddles and mysteries of life that we encounter at every turn.

Thus we also come to an understanding of numerous phenomena of social life, to the solution of the contradictions between conservatism and progress; we see how, on the one hand, the forces of life work, hurrying forward, and on the other hand, the forces of form, maintaining and preserving.

On deeper study, we learn that even progress can be harmful if it does not give to the second pole of life what belongs to it, if it does not do justice to the form that life cultivates and strengthens through resistance.

If we approach life from the standpoint of spiritual science, we find that life will not burden us, but will fill us with understanding and reverence, making us free and ; correctly understood, Theosophy shows us guidelines that we can take up, opens up the depths of life to us and, as a worldview, shows us ways to transform our views and ideas into certainty, strength and hope. Then we will not lose ourselves in difficult moments, nor drown in our grief in dark moments, if we were once privileged to look deeper into the foundations of life and the world.

But for such an acceptance of the theosophical teaching, no other proofs are needed than those which life itself gives us step by step. Those who saturate themselves with these teachings and then approach all questions of life understand that Theosophy is not only a theory, but also practical wisdom for life and ultimately a precious wealth of life of inestimable value.

A special consideration of the lectures on “Occult Physiology”

Following the public lectures “How to Refute Theosophy?” and “How to Defend Theosophy?” and following the reflections that I have given in the lecture cycle on “Occult Physiology” over the past few days, “Occult Physiology”, a number of questions may arise, and there is a need to communicate a little with the honored audience about these questions, which have been touched upon here. The two public lectures were primarily aimed at showing how, on the basis of spiritual science or theosophy, one must be very aware of the possible objections that may arise, and how the occultist and on the other hand, it should be clear to you from the lectures how to defend the Theosophical truths in the face of the opponents' weighty objections.

However, it is precisely from the realization of the difficulties that arise for Theosophy that every Theosophist should feel the need for the greatest possible accuracy and precision in the presentation of the Theosophical truths. Those who, out of a realization of the corresponding connections, have to represent these things are well aware of this, but despite all that has been emphasized in public lectures, they inevitably come into conflict with those who stand on the ground of today's science. Therefore, as strange as it may seem, Theosophy requires, on the one hand, the most exact and precise logical formulation for clothing the truths brought down from the higher worlds, and on the other hand, no less for the mere ordinary reasonableness. And anyone who sets himself this task of formulating precisely and exactly logically, and for this purpose avoids everything that might be a mere filler in a sentence or merely rhetorical embellishment, very often feels how easily he can be misunderstood, simply because in our time there is not everywhere the same intense need to accept the truths put forward just as exactly and precisely as they are expressed. Even in its scientific endeavors, humanity in our time is not yet accustomed to taking things exactly. If one takes what is said quite exactly, then not only must one not change anything in the sentences, but one must also pay close attention to the boundaries that are included in the formulations.

We have a suitable example of this, which came up recently during a question and answer session. The question was asked: If dream consciousness is only a kind of pictorial consciousness, how is it then that certain subconscious actions, such as night wandering, can be carried out from this dream consciousness? The questioner has not taken into account, as I mentioned at the time, that the sentence that the contents of dream consciousness are pictorial does not mean that they are only pictorial, but that, of course, since only one side of the horizon of dream consciousness has been characterized from only one side, it followed from the very nature of this characterization that just as our daytime actions follow from our daytime consciousness, so too certain actions of a less conscious nature could follow from the pictorial consciousness of the dream.

It should be said without charge that not listening carefully is one of the main reasons why so many misunderstandings are brought to Theosophy and its representation today. Such misunderstandings are not only brought by the opponents of Theosophy, but also to a large extent by those who profess this Theosophical worldview. And perhaps a large part of the blame for the misunderstandings that the outside world has of spiritual science lies in the fact that even within the theosophical circles, so much is sinned in the direction just described.

If we now look around at the sciences that are recognized in our time, we might perhaps have the general feeling that Theosophy has the greatest affinity with the various branches of philosophy. Such an assertion would be absolutely correct, and one could actually assume from the nature of the matter that the closest possibility of understanding the theosophical insights would be on the side of philosophy. But precisely there, other difficulties arise.

Philosophy, as it is cultivated today, one might say everywhere, has become a kind of specialized science to a much greater extent than it was relatively recently. It has become a specialized science and, if we look at its practical work today and do not get involved in individual theories, it works essentially in abstract regions. And there is not much inclination to lead philosophy back to a concrete conception of the actual. Indeed, there are even difficulties in the way philosophy is practiced today if one wants to embrace the world of the actual with this philosophical endeavor. The epistemology that has been developed with great ingenuity in the second half of the 19th century and up to the present day in the most diverse directions has come about mainly because these difficulties in penetrating from the abstract heights of thinking, of the concept, down to the facts were felt.

Now, in lectures such as this series on “Occult Physiology”, Theosophy is needed everywhere to penetrate directly into our actual world with what it has to give as supersensible contents of consciousness. If I may speak in trivial terms, I would like to say: Theosophy is not as fortunate as today's philosophy, which dwells in abstract regions and which would not be very inclined to include in its considerations such concepts as, let us say, blood or liver or spleen, that is, contents of the actual. It would shrink from making the transition from its abstract concepts to the concrete events and things that directly and actually approach us. Theosophy is more daring in this respect and can therefore very easily be regarded as a spiritual activity that boldly and unjustifiably builds a bridge from the most spiritual to the most factual.

Now it must be interesting to ask oneself why philosophers find it so difficult to approach Theosophy. Perhaps precisely because philosophy avoids building this bridge.

For Theosophy itself, this fact is in a sense fatal, extraordinarily so. For one very often encounters resistance to the Theosophical insights, especially when one wants to work through them logically. It is precisely on the philosophical side that one encounters resistance in this regard. And it has even happened very often that one encounters less resistance when one, so to speak, gleefully tells people sensational observations from the higher worlds. They often forgive this relatively easily, because, firstly, these things are “interesting” and, secondly, people say to themselves: Well, since we cannot see into these worlds, we are not called upon to make any judgment about them.

Now, however, the aim of Theosophy is to bring everything that can be found in the higher worlds down to a rational level of understanding. The facts, if they can truly be regarded as such, are found through supersensible research in the supersensible worlds. In our time, however, the form of presentation should be such that everything is clothed in strictly logical forms and that, wherever it is already possible today, it is pointed out how the most actual external processes can already provide us with confirmations everywhere for what we can assert from spiritual research. In this whole process of bringing down the knowledge of the spiritual world, of clothing it in logical or other rational forms and presenting it in a form that meets the logical needs of our time, there now exists, one might say, a truly extraordinary source of misunderstanding. Take the complicated things that were said in these lectures on “Occult Physiology,” which can only be applied with restrictions and with precise indications of the limits. Take the very complicated things in the immensely mobile and variable world of the spiritual, and compare this world of the spiritual in all its variability, in the difficulty of encompassing something coming down to us from spiritual worlds with rough conceptual contours, compare it with the ease with which any external fact can be characterized through an experiment or through sensory observation and described in a logical style!

Now, however, throughout our philosophy today, there is a tendency to take no account whatever when defining and describing concepts other than those derived from the world that lies before us as the sensual world. This is particularly noticeable in philosophy when it is compelled, for example in the ethical field, to find a different origin for the basic concepts than those derived from the external perception of the physical world. We find – and this could easily be demonstrated, but of course only through detailed explanations from contemporary philosophical literature – that in everything that is dealt with in philosophy today, the definitions of terms are so rough because, when it comes to conceptualized content, basically the only consideration is the perceptual world that exists around us, and it is only on the basis of this that concepts are formed.

Is there any evidence that in philosophy, when the most elementary concepts arise, the content of consciousness is also obtained from a different source than from the world of sensory perception? — In short, contemporary philosophy lacks the possibility of coming to an understanding of theosophy because it cannot tie in with its theories with concepts such as we use in our theosophical discussions. In philosophical literature, the horizon of consciousness has been defined in such a way that when concepts are formed, only the external world of perception is taken into account, and not the kind of content that comes from a different source than that of sensory perception.

Theosophy, however, must arrive at its concepts in a completely different way; it must ascend to supersensible knowledge and bring its concepts down from the supersensible. But it must also delve into the realm of reality and must govern the philosophical concepts gained from observation of the sensual world. If we want to visualize this schematically, then on the one hand we have concepts in philosophy that are gained through external perception, and on the other hand we have concepts that are gained from the supersensible through spiritual perception. And if we think of the field of concepts through which we communicate, we have to say: If theosophy is to be considered justified, then our concepts must be taken from both sides, on the one hand from sensory perception, on the other hand from spiritual perception, and these two sides must meet in the field of our concepts.

Concepts gained through external perception (philosophy) + concepts gained through supersensible perception (theosophy) = conceptual field

Particularly in theosophical expositions, there is a need for the concepts brought down from the spiritual world to meet with the philosophical concepts. This means that our concepts can be connected everywhere to the concepts that are gained from the world of external sensory perception.

Our present-day epistemologies are more or less almost exclusively constructed from the point of view that the concepts are taken only from one side. I do not want to say that there are no epistemologies where something supernatural is admitted as the origin of the concepts. But wherever something is to be proved positively, the examples are characterized by the fact that the concepts are taken only from the left side (scheme), that is, from the side on which the concepts are gained from the sensual-physical world of perception. This is also quite natural because [in philosophy] spiritual facts are not recognized as such. The possibility is simply not considered that spiritual facts, which are brought down from the spiritual worlds, can be conceptualized in the same way that the facts of the physical world are conceptualized. This circumstance has led to the fact that Theosophy, when it wants to communicate with philosophy, finds almost no prepared ground on the side of philosophy and that in philosophy the way in which concepts are used in Theosophy cannot easily be understood.

One might say: When dealing with the world of outer sensory perception, it is easy to give concepts clear contours. Here, things themselves have clear contours, clear boundaries, and one is easily able to give concepts clear contours as well. If, on the other hand, one is confronted with the spiritual world, which is mobile and variable in itself, then much must often first be gathered together and restrictions or extensions made in the concepts in order to be able to characterize to some extent what is actually to be said. The theory of knowledge as it is pursued today is least of all suited to engage with such concepts as they are used in Theosophy. Because, in order to define the terms, the reasons for the definitions — consciously or unconsciously — are only taken from one side, and so, without really knowing it, something is mixed into all the terms that are formed that leads to epistemological terms that are not at all useful for explaining or elucidating anything in Theosophy. The concept, as it is supplied by the so-called non-theosophical world, is simply unsuitable as an instrument for characterizing what is brought down from the spiritual world through Theosophy.

Now there is one such concept in particular that is a terrible troublemaker in the field of epistemology. I know very well that it is not perceived as such at all, but it is a troublemaker. If we disregard all the finer nuances that have emerged so astutely in the course of the 19th century, this is where the epistemological problem is formulated that one says: How does the I, with its content of consciousness - or, if you will, without speaking of the I -, how does our content of consciousness come to be related to a reality by us? These trains of thought have more or less – with the exception of certain epistemological trends in the 19th century – led to an epistemology that repeatedly perceives it as a great difficulty to see the possibility of how the trans-subjective or transcendental, that is, that which lies outside our consciousness, can enter our consciousness. I will admit that this only roughly characterizes the problem of knowledge. But the difficulties are essentially characterized by the fact that one says: How can that which is subjective content of consciousness somehow approach being, reality? How can it be related to reality? For we must be clear about the fact that even if we presuppose a trans-subjective reality lying outside our consciousness, that which is within our consciousness cannot directly approach this reality. We therefore have – so it is said – the content of consciousness within us, and we can ask ourselves: how do we have the possibility, from this content of consciousness, to penetrate into being, into reality, which is independent of our consciousness?—

An important contemporary epistemologist has characterized this problem with a concise expression: The human ego, in so far as it encompasses the horizon of consciousness, cannot leap over itself, for it would have to leap out of itself if it were to leap into reality. But then it would be in reality and not in consciousness. — It seems clear to this epistemologist, then, that nothing can be said about the relationship between the content of consciousness and real reality.

Many years ago, in my epistemological writings, I was concerned, first of all, with establishing this problem of knowledge – which is also fundamental in Theosophy – and then with removing the difficulties that arise from such a formulation as the one just described. In doing so, however, something very strange could happen. For example, at the time when what I want to talk about took place, there were philosophers who started from the premise, very similar to Schopenhauer's, that “the world is my idea.” That is to say, that which is given in consciousness is initially only the content of our imagination. The question then arises as to how to build a bridge from the imagination to that which is outside the imagined, to trans-subjective reality. Now, for anyone who is not fascinated by statements that have supposedly been made in this field, but approaches the matter impartially, a question is immediately posed, and in the face of a large amount of epistemological literature, namely that which was written in the seventies and in the first half of the eighties, one must ask: If anything is “my idea” and if this idea itself is supposed to be more than something lying within the content of consciousness, if it is supposed to have validity for itself, then this means that something is said which, basically, must not lie before the starting point of epistemology, but something that can only be established after these much more important epistemological basic questions have been discussed. For we must first ask ourselves: Why are we at all allowed to call something that arises in us as content of consciousness “my idea”? Do we have the right to say: What appears on my horizon of consciousness is my idea? Epistemology certainly does not have the right to start from the judgment that what is given is my idea, but rather, if it really goes back to its first beginnings, it has the duty to first justify that what appears is the subjective content of consciousness.

Of course, there are several hundred objections to what has just been said, but I don't think it's possible to hold on to a single one of them for long if you approach the matter with an open mind. But I did experience that a well-known and important philosopher gave me a very peculiar answer when I pointed out this dilemma to him and wanted to explain that it should first be examined whether it is epistemologically justified to characterize the imagination as something unreal. He said: “That is self-evident, it is already in the definition of the word ‘imagination’ that we place something in front of us that is not real.” He could not understand - so ingrained were these ideas, which have grown over the centuries - that with this first definition, something completely unfounded is placed.

If we want to make any kind of statement at all within the scope of the world in which we find ourselves – whereby I ask you to understand the words “the world in which we find ourselves” as the world as we experience it in our everyday lives – , for example, that what is given as the world is an “idea”, then we must realize that it is not at all possible to make such a statement without that which we call our thinking activity, without thoughts and concepts. I do not want to say anything about the fact that such a statement is actually a “judgment” in formal logic. In the moment when we begin at all not to leave anything as it appears before us, but to make a statement about it, we intervene with our thinking in the world that is around us. And if we are to have any right to intervene in the world, to define something as “subjective,” then we must be aware that that which defines something as being called subjective must itself not be subjective.

Because if we assume that we have the sphere of subjectivity here (a circle is drawn on the board and the word “subjectivity” is written above it) and, from there, we make the statement, for example, that A is subjective, is “my idea” or whatever, then this statement itself is subjective.

Subjectivity

The conclusion from this is not that we may accept this statement, but the conclusion must be that such a conclusion must not be drawn, because such a statement would cancel itself out. If a subjectivity can only be established from within itself, then that would be a self-abrogating statement. If the statement “A is subjective” is to have any meaning, then it must not proceed from the sphere of subjectivity, but from a reality outside of subjectivity. That is to say, if the “I” is to be at all in a position to say that something has a subjective character, for example, if something is “my idea”, if the “I” is to have the right to call something subjective, then it must not be within the sphere of subjectivity itself, but must make this observation from outside the sphere of subjectivity. Thus we must not trace the statement that something is subjective back to the ego, which itself is subjective.*)

But this provides a way out of the sphere of subjectivity, in that we realize that we could not make any statement about what is subjective and what is objective, and would have to refrain from even the very first steps of thinking about it at all, if we did not stand in such a relationship to subjectivity and objectivity that both have an equal share in us. This leads us to recognize – which I cannot expand on further now – that our ego cannot be taken only subjectively, but is more comprehensive than our subjectivity. We have the right, from a given content, that is, from something objective, to distinguish that which is subjective.

We are initially confronted with the different terms “objective”, “subjective” and “transsubjective”. “Objective” is, of course, different from “transsubjective” [gap in the transcripts].

Now the question is – once we have established these prerequisites – whether we are able to remove the stumbling block that is one of the most important obstacles in epistemology, namely the question of whether or not the whole extent of our self can be found within subjectivity. For if the ego must also partake of objectivity, the question “Can something enter the sphere of subjectivity?” takes on a completely different form. As soon as one can describe the ego as participating in the sphere of objectivity, the ego must have qualities within it that are similar to those of the objective; something from the sphere of objectivity must also be found in the ego. In other words, we may now assume a relationship between the objective and the subjective that differs significantly from the view that nothing can pass from the trans-subjective to the subjective.

If one says that nothing can pass over to the subjective, then, firstly, one has defined the subjective in epistemological terms as self-contained, and, secondly, one has used a concept that is only valid for a certain sphere of reality, but cannot be valid for the whole of reality. This is the concept of the “thing in itself”. This concept plays a major role for many epistemologists; it is like a net in which philosophical thinking catches itself. However, one does not realize that this concept applies only to a certain sphere of reality and that it ceases to have validity where this sphere ceases.

In the material, for example, the concept applies. I would like to recall the example of the seal and sealing wax. If you take a seal on which the name “Miller” is engraved and press it into hot sealing wax, then you can rightly say: Nothing of the matter of the seal can come over into the sealing wax. - There you have something where the non-transferability applies. But it is different with the name “Müller”; it can flow completely into the sealing wax. And if the wax could speak and wanted to emphasize that none of the material of the seal had flowed into it, it would still have to admit that what matters, namely the name “Müller,” had come across completely. So we have gone beyond the sphere where the concept of the “thing in itself” had any justification.

How did it come about that this concept, which appears in a certain refined way in Kant, rather coarsely in Schopenhauer, but then is described astutely by the most diverse epistemologists of the 19th century, was able to gain such significance?

It is, if you look at the whole thing more closely, because what people work out in concepts depends on the whole way they think. Only in an age in which all concepts have to be characterized in such a way that they are always formed by external perception could such a concept as that of the “thing in itself” arise.

But concepts derived from outer perception alone are not suitable for characterizing the spiritual. If it were not for the fact that a disguised, one might say thoroughly masked, materialism has been introduced into the theory of knowledge — for that is the crucial point: a materialism that is really not easy to recognize has been introduced into the theory of knowledge - then one would realize that a theory of knowledge that is to apply to the spiritual realm must also have concepts that are not formulated in this crude style, such as the concept of the “thing in itself.” For the spiritual, where one cannot speak of an outside and an inside in the same sense, it must be clear that we need more subtle concepts.

I could only sketch this out, because otherwise I would have to write a whole book, which would be very thick and would also have to have several volumes because I would have to connect metaphysical areas to the history of philosophy and to epistemology. But you can see that it is quite understandable that this kind of thinking, because it arises from deeply masked prejudices, is unusable for everything that reaches into the spiritual world. I have spoken to you for an hour now only about this most abstract concept. I have tried to make the matter understandable and I am absolutely clear about the fact that the objections, which are clearly before my mind, can of course arise in many other minds as well. If it had been a different meeting, it might have required a special justification to deceive one's listeners, as it were, by speaking in the most abstract — or, as some might believe, the most complicated — terms instead of the usual factual material that is expected. Well, in the course of our theosophical work, we have seen time and again that theosophy also has the good thing that one develops the duty to recognize within the theosophical movement, and that with it, little by little, a naughty concept is overcome that exists everywhere else, a very naughty concept that says: This is something that goes beyond my horizon, that I don't want to deal with, that is not interesting to me!

For some who deal with fundamental philosophical questions and who know from experience the sometimes sparsely attended lectures on epistemology, it may be surprising that here in our movement so many people, who, according to the judgment of this or that epistemologist, are “most thorough dilettantes” in the field of epistemology, come to a meeting to listen to such a topic. In some places we have had an even larger audience, especially at philosophical lectures that were interspersed with theosophical lectures. But if you look at the situation more thoroughly, you may say that this is precisely one of the best testimonies for the theosophists. The theosophists know that they should listen to all the objections that can be raised without prejudice. They remain calm in the face of such objections, for they know full well that, although it is possible and legitimate to raise objections to research in the supersensible worlds, they also know that much of what is initially called illogical may ultimately turn out to be very logical after all. The theosophist also learns to consider it his duty to accept knowledge into his soul, even if it takes effort to deal with epistemology and logic. For in this way he will increasingly be able not only to listen to general theosophical expositions, but also to work seriously with logical concepts and conceptual classifications in theosophy. The world will have to become familiar with the idea that philosophy in its broadest sense will be reborn within the theosophical movement. Zeal for philosophical rigor, for thorough logical conceptualization, will gradually, if I may use the word, take root within the Theosophical movement. By which I do not mean to say that the results in this respect, on close inspection, are not already very satisfactory. We will still have to view this with modesty, but we are on the way to achieving this goal.

The more we acquire the good will for intellectual endeavor, for scientific conscientiousness, for philosophical thoroughness, the more we will be able to use theosophical work not only to pursue our own personal goals, but also to achieve goals for humanity. Some things are only at the stage of the very first volition today. But it is evident that in the will that is applied to knowledge, there is already something like an ethical self-education that is achieved through the interest we take in Theosophy. And soon there will be no lack of that. If there are no obstacles other than those that already exist today, the outside world will not be able to deny Theosophy the recognition that the Theosophist does not strive for easy satisfaction of his soul's longings, but that in Theosophy a serious striving for philosophical thoroughness and conscientiousness is manifested, not mere dilettantism. This striving will be particularly suited to sharpening people's philosophical conscience. If we do not accept the theosophical teachings as dogmas, but understand what Theosophy can be as a real power in our soul, then it can be the fuel for the human soul to increasingly grasp the hidden powers within it and to lead it to an awareness of its destiny. Therefore, within our Theosophical movement, we want to promote this zeal for thorough logic and epistemology, and so, by standing firmer on the ground of our physical world, we learn to look up ever more clearly and without raptures and nebulous mysticism to the spiritual worlds, whose content we want to bring down and insert into our physical world view.

Whether we want to do this depends solely on whether we can ascribe a real mission to Theosophy in the earthly existence of humanity.

This lecture-cycle deals with a subject which concerns Man very closely, namely, the exact nature and life of Man himself. Although so close to man, because it concerns himself; the subject is a difficult one to approach. For if we turn our attention to the challenge ”Know thyself!”, a challenge that has forced itself upon man through all the ages, as we may say, from mystic, occult heights, we see at once that a real, true self-knowledge is very hard of attainment. This applies not only to individual, personal self-knowledge, but above all to knowledge of the human being as such. Indeed it is precisely because man is so far from knowing his own being and has such a long way to go in order to know himself, that the subject we are about to discuss in the course of these few days will be in a certain respect something alien to us, something for which much preparation is necessary. Moreover it is not without reason that I myself have only reached the point where I can at last speak upon this theme as the result of mature reflection covering a long period of time. For it is a theme which cannot be approached with any prospect of arriving at a true and honest observation unless a certain attitude, often left out of account in ordinary scientific observation, be adopted. This attitude is one of reverence in the presence of the essential nature and Being of Man. It is, then, of vital importance that we maintain this attitude as a fundamental condition underlying the following reflections.

How can one truly maintain this reverence? In no other way, than by first disregarding what he appears to be in everyday life, whether it be oneself or another is of no consequence, and then by uplifting ourselves to the conception: Man, with all that he has evolved into, is not here for his own sake; he is here as revelation of the Divine Spirit, of the whole World. He is a revelation of the Godhead of the World! And, when a man speaks of aspiring after self-knowledge, of aspiring to become ever more and more perfect, in the spiritual-scientific sense which has just been indicated, this should not be due to the fact that he desires merely from curiosity, or from a mere craving or knowledge, to know what man is; but rather that he feels it to be his duty to fashion ever more and more perfectly this representation, this revelation, of the World Spirit through Man, so that he may find some meaning in the words, “to remain unknowing is to sin against Divine destiny!” For the World Spirit has implanted in us the power to have knowledge; and, when we do not will to acquire knowledge, we refuse what we really ought not to refuse, namely, to be a revelation of the World Spirit; and we represent more and more, not a revelation of the World Spirit, but a caricature, a distorted image of it. It is our duty to strive to become ever increasingly an image of the World Spirit. Only when we can give meaning to these words, “to become an image of the World Spirit”; only when it becomes significant for us in this sense to say, “We must learn to know, it is our duty to learn to know,” only then can we sense aright that feeling of reverence we have just demanded, in the presence of the Being of Man. And for one who wishes to reflect, in the occult sense, upon the life of man, upon the essential quality of man's being, this reverence before the nature of man is an absolute necessity, for the simple reason that it is the only thing capable of awakening our spiritual sight, our entire spiritual faculty for seeing and beholding the things of the spirit, of awakening those forces which permit us to penetrate into the spiritual foundation of man's nature. Anyone who, as seer and investigator of the Spirit, is unable to have the very highest degree of reverence in the presence of the nature of man, who cannot permeate himself to the very fibres of his soul with the feeling of reverence before man's nature, must remain with closed eyes (however open they may be for this or that spiritual secret of the world) to all that concerns what is really deepest in the Being of Man. There may be many clairvoyants who can behold this or that in the spiritual environment of our existence; yet, if this reverence is lacking, they lack also the capacity to see into the depths of man's nature, and they will not know how to say anything rightly with regard to what constitutes the Being of Man.

In the external sense the teaching about life is called physiology. This teaching should not here be regarded in the same way as in external science but as it presents itself to the spiritual eye; so that we may look beyond the forms of the outer man, beyond the form and functions of his physical organs into the spiritual, super-sensible foundation of the organs, of the life-forms and life processes. And since it is not our intention here to pursue this “occult physiology,” as it may be called, in any unreal way, it will be necessary in several cases to refer with entire candour to things which from the very beginning will sound rather improbable to anyone who is more or less uninitiated. At the same time, it may be stated that this cycle of lectures, even more than some others I have delivered, forms a whole, and that no single part of any one lecture, especially the earlier ones—for much that is to find expression in the course of this cycle will have to be affirmed without restraint—should be torn from its context and judged separately. On the contrary, only after having heard the concluding lectures will it be possible to form a judgment with regard to what really has been said. For this reason, therefore, it will be necessary to proceed in a somewhat different way, in this occult physiology, from that of external physiology. The foundations for our introductory statements will be confirmed by what meets us at the conclusion. We shall not be called upon to draw a straight line, as it were, from the beginning to the end; but we shall proceed in a circle so that we shall return again, at the end, to the point from which we started.

It is an examination, a study, of Man, that is to be presented here. At first he appears before our external senses in his outer form. We know, of course, that to what in the first place the layman with his purely external observation can know concerning man, there is to-day a very great deal which science has added through research. Therefore, when considering what we are able to know of the human being at the present time through external experience and observation, we must of necessity combine what the layman is in a position to observe in himself and others with what science has to say, including those branches of scientific observation which come to their results through methods and instruments worthy of our admiration.

If we bear in mind first, purely as regards external man, all that a layman may observe in him (or may perhaps have learned from some sort of popular description of the nature of man), then it will perhaps not seem incomprehensible if, from the very beginning, attention is called to the fact that even the outer shape of man, as it meets us in the outside world, really consists of a duality. And for anyone who wishes to penetrate into the depths of human nature, it is absolutely necessary that he becomes conscious of the fact, that even external man, as regards his form and stature, presents fundamentally a duality.

One part of man, which we can clearly distinguish, consists of everything that is to be found enclosed in organs affording the greatest protection against the outside world: that is, all that we may include within the region of the brain and the spinal cord. Everything belonging in this connection to the nature of man, to the brain and spinal cord, is firmly enclosed in a secure protective bony structure. Taking a side view, we observe that what belongs to these two systems may be illustrated in the following way. If a in this diagram represents all the super-imposed vertebrae along the whole length of the spinal cord, and b the cranium and the bones of the skull, then inside the canal which is formed by these super-imposed vertebrae, as well as by the bones of the skull, is enclosed everything belonging to the sphere of the brain and the spinal cord. One cannot observe the human being without becoming conscious of the fact that everything pertaining to this region forms a totality complete within itself; and that the rest of man (which we might group physiologically in the most varied ways, as the neck, the trunk, the limb-structure) keeps its connection with all that we reckon as brain and spinal cord by means of more or less thread-like or ribbon-shaped formations, pictorially speaking, which must first break through this protective sheath, in order that a connection may be brought about between the portion enclosed within this bony structure and the portion attached to it as exterior nature of man. Thus we may say that, even to a superficial observation, everything constituting man proves itself to be a duality, the one portion lying within the bony structure we have described, the firm and secure protective sheath, and the other portion without.

At this point we must cast a purely superficial glance at that which lies within this bony structure. Here again we can quite easily distinguish between the large mass embedded within the skull-bones in the form of a brain, and that other portion which is appended to it like a stalk or cord and which, while organically connected with the brain, extends in this thread-like outgrowth of the brain into the spinal canal. If we differentiate between these two structures we must at once call attention to something which external science does not need to consider, something of which occult science, however, since its task is to penetrate into the depths of the being of things, must indeed take note. We must call attention to the fact that everything which we consider as the basis of a study of man refers, in the first place, only to Man. For the moment we enter into the deeper fundaments of the separate organs, we become aware (and we shall see in the course of these lectures that this is true) that any one of these organs, through its deeper significance in the case of man, may have an entirely different task from that of the corresponding organ in the animal world. Or, to put it more exactly, anyone who looks upon such things with the help of ordinary external science will say: “What you have been telling us here may be just as truly affirmed with reference to the animals.” That which is said here, however, with reference to the essential nature of the organs in the case of the human being, cannot be said in the same way with regard to the animal. On the contrary the occult task is to consider the animal by itself, and to investigate whether that which we are in a position to state regarding man with reference to the spine and the brain, is valid also for animals. For the fact that the animals closely related to man also have a spine and a brain does not prove that these organs, in their deeper significance, have the same task in both man and animal; just as the fact that a man holds a knife in his hand does not indicate whether it is for the purpose of carving a piece of veal or in order to erase something. In both cases we have to do with a knife; and he who considers only the form of the knife, that is, the knife as knife, will believe that in both cases it amounts to the same thing. In both cases, he who stands on the basis of a science that is not occult will say that we have to do with a spinal cord and a brain; and he will believe, since the same organs are to be found in man and animal, that these organs must therefore have the same function. But this is not true. It is something that has become a habit of thought in external science, and has led to certain inaccuracies; and it can be corrected only if external science will accustom itself gradually to enter into what can be stated from out of the depths of super-sensible research regarding the different living beings.

Now, when we consider the spinal cord on the one hand, and the brain on the other, we can easily see that there is a certain element of truth in something already pointed out more than a hundred years ago by thoughtful students of nature. There is a certain rightness in the statement that when one observes the brain carefully it looks, so to speak, like a transformed spinal cord. This becomes all the more intelligible when we remember that Goethe, Oken, and other similarly reflective observers of nature, turned their attention primarily to the fact that the skull-bones bear certain resemblances of form to the vertebrae of the spine. Goethe, for example, was impressed very early in his reflections by the fact that when one imagines a single vertebra of the spinal column transformed, levelled and distended there may appear through such a reshaping of the vertebrae the bones of the head, the skull-bones; thus, if one should take a single vertebra and distend it on all sides so that it has elevations here and there, and at the same time is smooth and uniform in its expansions, the form of the skull might in this way be gradually derived from a single vertebra. Thus we may in a certain respect call the skull-bones reshaped vertebrae.

Now, just as we can look upon the skull-bones which enclose the brain as transformed vertebrae, as the transformation of such bones as enclose the spinal cord, so we may also think of the mass of the spinal cord distended in a different way, differentiated, more complex, till we obtain out of the spinal cord, so to speak, through this alteration, the brain. We might likewise, for instance, think how out of a plant, which at first has only green foliage, there grows forth the blossom. And so we might imagine that through the reshaping of a spinal cord, through its elevation to higher stages, the entire brain could be formed. (Later on, it will become clear how this matter is to be considered scientifically.) We may accordingly imagine our brain as a differentiated spinal cord.

Let us now look at both of these organs from this standpoint. Which of the two must we naturally look upon as the younger? Certainly not that one which shows the derived form, but rather the one which shows the original form. The spinal cord is at the first stage, it is younger; and the brain is at the second stage, it has gone through the stage of a spinal cord, is a transformed spinal cord, and is therefore to be considered as the older organ. In other words, if we fix our attention upon this new duality which meets us in man as brain and spinal cord, we may say that all the latent tendencies, all the forces, which lead to the building of a brain must be older forces in man; for they must first, at an earlier stage, have formed the tendency to a spinal cord, and must then have worked further toward the re-forming of this beginning of a spinal cord into a brain. A second start, as it were, must therefore have been made, in which our spinal cord did not progress far enough to reach the second stage but remained at the stage of the spinal cord. We have, accordingly, in this spine and nerve system (if we wish to express ourselves with pedantic exactness) a spine of the first order; and in our brain a spinal cord of the second order, a re-formed spinal cord which has become older—a spinal cord which once was there as such, but which has been transformed into a brain.

Thus we have, in the first place, shown with absolute accuracy just what we need to consider when we fix our attention objectively upon the organic mass enclosed; within this protective bony sheath. Here, however, something else must be taken into account, namely, something which really can confront us only in the field of occultism. A question may suggest itself, when for instance we speak as we have just been doing about the brain and the spinal cord, taking perhaps the following form: when such a re-formation as this takes place, from the plan of an organ at a first stage to the plan of an organ at a second stage, the evolutionary process may be progressive, or it may be retrogressive. That is, the process before us may either be one which leads to higher stages of perfection of the organ, or one which causes the organ to degenerate and gradually to die. We might say therefore, when we consider an organ like our spinal cord as it is to-day, that it seems to us to be at the present time a relatively young organ since it has not yet succeeded in becoming a brain. We may think about this spinal cord in two different ways. First, we may consider that it has in itself the forces through which it may also one day become a brain. In that case, it would be in a position to pass through a progressive evolution, and to become what our brain is to-day; or secondly, we may consider that it has not at all the latent tendency to attain to this second stage. In that case its evolution would be leading toward extinction; it would pass into decadence and be destined to suggest the first stage and not to arrive at the second. Now, if we reflect that the groundwork of our present brain is what was once the plan or beginning of a spinal cord, we see that that former spinal cord undoubtedly had in it the forces of a progressive evolution, since it actually did become a brain. If, on the other hand, we consider at this point our present spinal cord, the occult method of observation reveals that what to-day is our spinal cord has not within itself, as a matter of fact, the latent tendency to a forward-directed evolution, but is rather preparing to conclude its evolution at this present stage.

If I may express myself grotesquely, the human being is not called upon to believe that one day his spinal cord, which now has the form of a slender string, will be puffed out as the brain is puffed out. We shall see later what underlies the occult view, so as to enable us to say this. Yet, through this simple comparison of the form of this organ in man and in the lower animals, where it first appears, you will find an external intimation of what has just been stated. In the snake, for example, the spine adds on to itself a series of innumerable rings behind the head and is filled out with the spinal cord, and this spinal column extends both forward and backward indefinitely. In the case of man the spinal cord, as it extends downward from the point where it is joined to the brain, actually tends more and more to a conclusion, showing less and less clearly that formation which it exhibits in its upper portions. Thus, even through external observation, one may notice that what in the case of the snake continues its natural evolution rearward, is here hastening toward a conclusion, toward a sort of degeneration. This is a method of observation through external comparison, and we shall see how the occult view affects it.

To summarise, then, we may say that within the bony structure of the skull we have a spinal cord which through a progressive development has become a brain, and is now at a second stage of its evolution; and in our spinal cord we have, as it were, the attempt once again to form such a brain, an attempt, however, which is destined to fail and cannot reach its full growth into a real brain.

Let us now proceed from this reflection to that which can be known even from an external, layman's observation, to the functions of the brain and the spinal cord. It is more or less known to everyone that the instrument of the so-called higher soul-activities, is in a certain respect, in the brain, that these higher soul-activities are directed by the organs of the brain. Furthermore, it is recognised that the more unconscious soul-activities are directed from the spinal cord. I mean those soul-activities in which very little deliberation interposes itself between the reception of the external impression and the action which follows it. Consider for a moment how you jerk back your hand when it is stung. Not very much deliberation intervenes between the sting and the drawing back. Such soul-activities as these are in fact, and with a certain justification, even regarded by natural science in such a way as to attribute to them the spinal cord as their instrument.

We have other soul-activities in which a more mature reflection interposes itself between the external impression and that which finally leads to action. Take, for example, an artist who observes external nature, straining every sense and gathering countless impressions. A long time passes, during which he works over these impressions in an inner activity of soul. He then proceeds to establish after a long interval through outward action what has grown, in long-continued soul-activity, out of the external impressions. Here there intervenes, between the outer impression and that which the man produces as a result of the outer impression, a richer activity of soul. This is also true of the scientific investigator; and, indeed, of anyone who reflects about the things that he wishes to do, and does not rush wildly at every external impression, who does not as it were, in reflex action fly into a passion like a bull when he sees the colour red, but thinks about what he wishes to do. In every instance where reflection intervenes, we encounter the brain as an instrument of soul-activity.

If we go still deeper into this matter we may say to ourselves: True, but how then does this soul-activity of ours, in which we use the brain, manifest itself? We perceive, to begin with, that it is of two different kinds, one of which takes place in our ordinary waking day-consciousness. In this consciousness we accumulate, through the senses, external impressions; and these we work over by means of the brain in rational reflection. To express it in popular language—we shall have to go into this still more accurately—we must picture to ourselves that these outer impressions find their way inside us through the doors of the senses, and stimulate certain processes in the brain. If we should wish, purely in connection with the external organisation, to follow what there takes place, we should see that the brain is set into activity through the stream of external impressions flowing into it; and that what this stream becomes, as a result of reflection, that is the deeds, the actions, which we ascribe to the instrumentality of the spinal cord.

Then, there also mingles in human life as it is to-day, between the wide-awake life of day and the unconscious life of sleep, the picture-life of dreams. This dream-life is a remarkable intermingling of the wide-awake life of day, which lays full claim to the instrument of our brain, and the unconscious life of sleep. Merely in outline, in a way that the lay thinker may observe for himself, we will now say something about this life of dreams.

We see that the whole of the dream-life has a strange similarity, from one aspect, to that subordinate soul-activity which we associate with the spinal cord. For, when dream-pictures emerge in our soul they do not appear as representations resulting from reflection, but rather by reason of a certain necessity, as, for instance, a movement of the hand results when a fly settles on the eye. In this latter case an action takes place as an immediate, necessary movement of defense. In dream-life something different appears, yet likewise because of an immediate necessity. It is not an action which here appears but rather a picture upon the horizon of the soul. Yet, just as we have no deliberate influence upon the movement of the hand in the wide-awake life of day, but make this movement of necessity, even so do we have no influence over the way that dream-pictures shape themselves, as they come and go in the chaotic world of dreams. We might say, therefore, that if we look at a man during his wide-awake life of day, and see something of what goes on within him in the form of reflex movements of all sorts, when he does things without reflecting, in response to external impressions; if we observe the sum-total of gestures and physiognomic expressions which he accomplishes without reflection, we then have a sum of actions which through necessity become a part of this man as soul-actions. If we now consider a dreaming man we have a sum of pictures, in this case something possessing the character not of action but of pictures, which work into and act upon his being. We may say, therefore, that just as in the wakeful life of day those human actions are carried out which arise and take shape without reflection, so do the dream-conceptions, chaotically flowing together, come about within a world of pictures.

Now, if we look back again at our brain, and wished to consider it as being in a certain way the instrument also of the dream-consciousness, what should we have to do? We should have to suppose that there is in some way or other something inside the brain which behaves in a way similar to the spinal cord that guides the unconscious actions. Thus, we have, as it were, to look upon the brain as primarily the instrument of the wide-awake soul-life, during which we create our concepts through deliberation, and underlying it a mysterious spinal cord which does not express itself; however, as a complete spinal cord but remains compressed inside the brain, and does not attain to actions. Whereas our spinal cord does attain to actions, even though these are not brought about through deliberation; the brain in this case induces merely pictures. It stops midway, this mysterious thing which lies there like the groundwork of a brain. Might we not say, therefore, that the dream-world enables us in a most remarkable way to point, as in a mystery, to that spinal cord lying there at the basis of the brain?

If we consider the brain, in its present fully-developed state, as the instrument of our wide-awake life of day, its appearance for us is that which it has when removed from the cavity of the skull. Yet there must be something there, within, when the wakeful life of day is blotted out. And here occult observation shows us that there actually is, inside the brain, a mysterious spinal cord which calls forth dreams. If we should wish to make a drawing of it, we could represent it in such a way that, within the brain which is connected with the world of ideas of the life of day, we should have an ancient mysterious spinal cord, invisible to external perception, in some way or other secreted inside it. I shall first state quite hypothetically that this spinal cord becomes active when man sleeps and dreams, and is active at that time in a manner characteristic of a spinal cord, namely, that it calls forth its effects through necessity. But, because it is compressed within the brain, it does not lead to actions, but only to pictures and picture-actions; for in dreams we act, as we know, only in pictures. So that because of this peculiar, strange, chaotic life that we carry on in dreams, we should have to point to the fact that underlying the brain, which we quite properly consider to be the instrument of our wide-awake life of day, is a mysterious organ which perhaps represents an earlier form of the brain—which has evolved itself to its present state out of this earlier form—and that this mysterious organ is active to-day only when the new form is inactive. It then reveals what the brain once was. This ancient spinal cord conjures up what is possible, considering the way it is enclosed, and induces, not completed actions, but only pictures.

Thus the observation of life leads us, of itself, to separate the brain into two stages. The very fact that we dream indicates that the brain has passed through two stages and has evolved to the wide-awake life of day. When, however, this wakeful day-time life is stilled, the ancient organ again exerts itself in the life of dreams. Thus we have first made types out of what external observation of the world furnishes us, which shows us that even observation of the soul-life adds meaning to what a consideration of the outer form can give us, namely, that the wide-awake life of day is related to dream-life in the same way as the perfected brain at the second stage of its evolution is related to its groundwork, to the ancient spinal cord which is at the first stage of its evolution. In a remarkable way, which we shall justify in the following lectures, occult, clairvoyant vision can serve us as a basis for a comprehensive observation of human nature, as it expresses itself in those organs enclosed within the bony mass of the skull and vertebrae.

In this connection you already know, from spiritual-scientific observations, that man's visible body is only one part of the whole human being, and that in the moment the seer's eye is opened the physical body reveals itself as enclosed, embedded, in a super-sensible organism, in what, roughly speaking, is called the “human aura.” For the present this may be here affirmed as a fact, and later we shall return to it to see how far the statement is justified. This human aura, within which physical man is simply enclosed like a kernel, shows itself to the seer's eye as having different colours. At the same time, we must not imagine that we could ever make a picture of this aura, for the colours are in continual movement; and every picture of it, therefore, that we sketch with pigment can be only an approximate likeness, somewhat in the same way that it is impossible to portray lightning, since one would always end by painting it only as a stiff rod, a rigid image. Just as it is never possible to paint lightning, so is it even less possible to do this in the case of the aura, because of the added fact that the auric colours are in themselves extraordinary unstable and mobile. We cannot, therefore, express it otherwise than to say that at best we are representing it symbolically.

Now, these auric colours show themselves as differing very remarkably, depending upon the fundamental character of the whole human organism. And it is interesting to call attention to the auric picture which presents itself to the clairvoyant eye, if we imagine the cranium and the spine observed from the rear. There we find that the appearance of that portion of the aura belonging to this region is such that we can only describe the whole man as embedded in the aura. Although we must remember that the auric colours are in a state of movement within the aura, yet it is evident that one of the colours is especially distinct, namely around the lower parts of the spine. We may call this greenish. And again we may mention another distinct colour, which does not in any other part of the body appear so beautiful as here, around the region of the brain; and this in its ground-tone is a sort of lilac-blue. You can get the best conception of this lilac-blue if you imagine the colour of the peach-blossom; yet even this is only approximate. Between this lilac-blue of the upper portion of the brain, and the green of the lower parts of the spine, we have other colour nuances surrounding the human being which are hard to describe, since they do not often appear among the ordinary colours present in the surrounding world of the senses. Thus, for instance, adjoining the green is a colour which is neither green, blue, nor yellow, but a mixture of all three. In short, there appear to us, in this intermediate space, colours which actually do not exist in the physical world of sense. Even though it is difficult to describe what is here within the aura, one thing may nevertheless be stated positively: beginning above with the puffed-out spinal cord, we have lilac-blue colour and then, coming down to the end of the spine, we have a more distinctly greenish shade.

This I wish to state as a fact, along with what has been said to-day in connection with a purely external observation of the human form and of human conduct. Following this, we shall endeavour to observe also that other part of the human being which is attached to the portion we have discussed to-day, in the form of neck, trunk, limbs, etc., as constituting the second part of the human duality, to the end that we may then be able to proceed to a consideration of what is presented to us in the complete interaction of this human duality.

We shall encounter again and again, in the course of our reflections, the difficulty of keeping in our mind's eye ever more exactly the exterior organism of man, in order that we may learn to know the transitory, the perishable. But we shall also see that this very road will lead us to a knowledge of the imperishable, the eternal in human nature. Also it will be necessary, in order to attain this goal, to sustain the effort of looking upon the exterior human organism in all reverence, as a revelation of the spiritual world.

When once we have permeated ourselves in some measure with spiritual-scientific concepts and feelings, we shall come quite easily to the thought that the human organism in its stupendous complexity must be the most significant expression, the greatest and most important manifestation, of those forces which live and weave as Spirit throughout the world. We shall, indeed, have to find our way upward ever more and more from the outer to the inner.

We have already seen that external observations, both from the point of view of the layman and from that of the scientific inquirer, must lead us to look upon man in a certain sense as a duality. We have characterised this duality of the human being—only hastily yesterday, to be sure, for we shall have to go into this still more accurately—as being enclosed within the protecting bony sheath of the skull and the spinal vertebrae. We have seen that, if we ascend beyond the exterior form of this part of man, we may gain a preliminary view of the connection between the life which we call our waking life of day, and that other life, in the first place very full of uncertainty for us, which we call the life of dreams. And we have seen that the external forms of that portion of human nature which we have described give us a kind of image, signify in a way a revelation, on the one hand of dream-life, the chaotic life of pictures; and on the other hand the waking day life, which is endowed with the capacity to observe in sharp outlines.

To-day we shall first cast a fleeting glance over that part of the human duality which may be found outside the region we had in mind yesterday. Even the most superficial glance over this second portion of the human being can teach us that this portion really presents a picture in a certain respect the opposite of the other one. In the brain and the spinal cord we have the bony formation as the outer circumference, the covering. If we consider the other portion of man's nature, we are surely obliged to say that here we have the bony formation disposed rather more within the organs. And yet this would be only a very superficial observation. We shall be carried deeper into the construction of this other portion of man's nature if, for the moment, we keep the most important systems of organs apart one from another, and compare them, first, outwardly, with what we learned yesterday.

The systems of organs, or systems of instruments, of the human organism to be considered first in this connection, must be the apparatus of nutrition and all that lies between this apparatus and that wonderful structure the heart, which we readily experience as a sort of central point of the whole human organism... And here even a superficial glance shows us at once that these systems of instruments, especially the apparatus of nutrition as we may call it in everyday speech, are intended to take in the substances of our external, earthly world and prepare them for further digestive work in the physical organism of man. We know that this apparatus of digestion begins by extending downward from the mouth, in the form of a tube, to the organ which everyone knows as the stomach. And a superficial observation teaches us that, from those articles of food which are conveyed through this canal into the stomach, the portions which are to a certain extent unassimilated are simply excreted, whereas other portions are carried over by the remaining digestive organs into the organism of the human body.

It is also well known that, adjoining the actual digestive apparatus in the narrower sense of the term, and for the purpose of taking over from it in a transformed condition the nutritive substances with which it has been supplied, is what we may call the lymph-system. I shall at this point speak merely in outline. We may repeat accordingly that, adjoining the apparatus of nutrition in so far as this is attached chiefly to the stomach, there is this system of organs called the lymph-system, consisting of a number of canals, which in their turn spread over the whole body; and that this system takes over, in a certain way, what has been worked over by the rest of the digestive apparatus, and delivers it into the blood.

And then we have the third of these systems of organs, the blood-vessel system itself, with its larger and smaller tubes extending throughout the entire human organism and having the heart as the central point of all its work. We know also that, going out from the heart, those blood-vessels or blood-filled vessels which are called arteries, convey the blood to all parts of our organism; that the blood goes through a certain process in the separate parts of the human organism, and then is carried back to the heart by means of other similar vessels which bring it back, however, in a transformed condition as so called “blue blood” in contrast to its red state. We know that this transformed blood, no longer useful for our life, is conducted from the heart into the lungs; that it there comes into contact with the oxygen taken up from the outer air; and that, by means of this, it is renewed in the lungs and conducted back again to the heart, to go its way afresh throughout the whole human organism.

If we are to consider these systems in their completeness, in order to have in our external method of observation a foundation for the occult method, let us begin by holding to that system which must, at the very outset, obviously be for everyone the central system of the entire human organism, namely, the blood-and-heart system. Let us, moreover, keep in mind that after the stale blood has been freshened in the lungs, transformed from blue blood into red blood, it returns once more to the heart and then goes out again from the heart as red blood, to be used in the organism. Notice, that everything which I intend to draw will be in mere outline, so that we shall be dealing only with sketches.

Let us now briefly recall that the human heart is an organ which, properly speaking, consists in the first place of four parts or chambers, so separated by interior walls that one can distinguish between the two larger spaces lying below and the two smaller ones lying above, the two lower ones being the ventricles, as they are generally called, and the two upper ones the auricles. I shall not speak about the “valves” to-day, but shall rather call attention, quite sketchily, to the course of the most important organic activities. And here, to begin with, one thing is clear: after the blood has streamed out of the left auricle into the left ventricle, it flows off through a large artery and from this point is conducted through the entire remainder of the organism. Now, let us bear in mind that this blood is first distributed to every separate organ of the whole organism; that it is then used up in this organism so that it is changed into the so-called blue blood, and as such returns to the right auricle of the heart; and that from there it flows into the right ventricle in order that it may go out again from this into the lungs, there again to be renewed and take a fresh course throughout the organism.

When we begin to visualise all this it is important, as a basis for an occult method of study, that we also add the fact that what we may call a subsidiary stream branches out from the aorta very near the heart; that this subsidiary stream leads to the brain, thus providing for the upper organs, and from there leads back again in the form of stale blood into the right auricle; and that it is there transformed, as blood which has passed through the brain, so to speak, in the same way as that blood is transformed which comes from the remaining members of the organism. Thus we have a smaller, subsidiary circuit of the blood, in which the brain is inserted, separate from the other main circuit which provides for the entire remaining organism. Now, it is of extraordinary importance for us to bear this fact in mind. For we can only arrive at an important conception, affording us a basis for everything that will enable us to ascend to occult heights, if at this point we first ask ourselves the following question: In the same way in which the upper organs are inserted in the smaller circuit, is there something similar inserted within the circuit of the blood which provides for the rest of the organism. Here we come, as a matter of fact, to a conclusion which even the external, superficial method of study can supply, that is, that there is inserted in the large circuit of the blood the organ we call the spleen; that further on is inserted the liver; and, still further on, the organ which contains the gall prepared by the liver.

Now, when we ask about the functions of these organs, external science answers by saying that the liver prepares the gall; that the gall flows out into the digestive canal, and takes part in digesting the food in such a way that this may then be taken up by the lymph-system and conducted over into the blood. Much less, however, does external science tell us with regard to the spleen, the third of the organs here considered as inserted in the main circuit. When we reflect upon these organs, we must first give attention to the fact that they have to occupy themselves with the preparation of the nutritive matter for the human organism; but that, on the other hand, they are all three inserted as organs into the circulatory course of the blood. It is not without reason that they are thus inserted, for, in so far as nutritive matter is taken up into the blood, to be conveyed by means of the blood to the human organism in order to continuously supply this with substances for its up-building, these three organs take part in the whole process of working over this nutritive matter.

Now arises the question: Can we already draw some sort of conclusion, from an external aspect, as to just how these organs take part in the joint activity of the human organism? Let us first fix our attention on this one external fact, namely, that these organs are inserted into the lower circulatory course of the blood in the same way in which the brain is inserted into the upper course; and let us now see for a moment, while first actually holding to this external method of study, which must later be deepened, whether it is possible that these organs really have a task similar to that of the brain. At the same time, wherein may such a task consist?

Let us begin by considering the upper portions of the human organism. It is these that receive the sense-impressions through the organs of sense, and work over the material contained in our sense-perceptions. We may say, therefore, that what takes place in the human head, in the upper part of the organism, is a working over of those impressions which flow in from outside through the sense-organs; and that what we may describe as the cause of everything that takes place in these upper parts is to be found in its essence in the external impressions or imprints. And, since these external impressions send their influences, together with what results from these influences in the working over of the outer impressions, into the upper organs of the organism, they therefore change the blood, or contribute to its change, and in their own way send this blood back to the heart transformed, just as the blood is sent back to the heart transformed from the rest of the organism.

Is it not obvious that we should now ask ourselves this other question: Since this upper part of the human organism opens outward by means of the sense-organs, opens doors to the outside world in the form of sense- organs, is there not a certain sort of correspondence between the working-in of the external world through these sense-organs upon the upper part of the human organism and that which works out of the three interior organs, the spleen, the liver, and the gall-bladder? Whereas, accordingly, the upper part of the organism opens outward in order to receive the influences of the outside world; and whereas the blood flows upwards, so to speak, in order to capture these impressions of the outside world, it flows downwards in order to take up what comes from these three organs. Thus we may say that, when we look out upon the world round about us, this world exercises its influence through our senses upon our upper organisation. And what thus flows in from outside, through the world of sense, we may think of as pressed together, contracted, as if into one centre; so that what flows into our organism from all sides is seen to be the same thing as that which flows out from the liver, the gall-bladder and the spleen, namely, transformed outside world. If you go further into this matter you will see that it is not such a very strange reflection.

Imagine to yourselves the different sense-impressions that stream into us; imagine these contracted, thickened or condensed, formed into organs and placed inside us. Thus the blood presents itself inwardly to the liver, gallbladder and spleen, in the same way as the upper part of the human organism presents itself to the outside world. And so we have the outside world which surrounds our sense-organs above, condensed as it were into organs that are placed in the interior of man, so that we may say: At one moment the world is working from outside, streaming into us, coming into contact with our blood in the upper organs, acting upon our blood; and the next moment that which is in the macrocosm works mysteriously in those organs into which it has first contracted itself, and there, from the opposite direction, acts upon our blood, presenting itself again in the same way as it does in the upper organs.

If we were to draw a sketch of this, we could do it by imagining the world on the one hand, acting from all directions upon our senses, and the blood exposing itself like a tablet to the impressions of this world; that would be our upper organism. And now let us imagine that we could contract this whole outer world into single organs, thus forming an extract of this world; that we could then transfer this extract into our interior in such a way that what is working from all directions now acts upon the blood from the other side of the tablet. We should then have formed in a most extraordinary way a pictorial scheme of the exterior and the interior of the human organism. And we might already to a certain extent be able to say that the brain actually corresponds to our inner organism, in so far as this latter occupies the breast and the abdominal cavity. The world has, as it were been placed in our inner man.

Even in this organisation, which we distinguish as a subordinate one, and which serves primarily for the carrying forward of the process of nutrition, we have something so mysterious as the fusion of the whole outer cosmos into a number of inner organs, inner instruments. And, if we now observe these organs more closely for a moment, the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen, we shall be able to say that the spleen is the first of these to offer itself to the blood-stream. This spleen is a strange organisation, embedded in plethoric tissue, and in this tissue there is a great number of tiny little granules—something which, in contrast to the rest of the mass of tissue, has the appearance of little white granules.

When we observe the relation between the blood and the spleen, the latter appears to us like a sieve through which the blood passes in order that it may offer itself to an organ of the kind which, in a certain sense, is a shrivelled-up portion of the macrocosm. Again, the spleen stands in connection with the liver. At the next stage we see how the blood offers itself to the liver, and how the liver in its turn, as a third step, secretes the gall, which then goes over into the nutritive substances, and from there comes with the transformed nutritive substances into the blood.

This offering of itself on the part of the blood to these three organs we cannot think of in any but the following way: The organ which first meets the blood is the spleen, the second is the liver, and the third is the gallbladder, which has really a very complicated relation to the entire blood system, in that the gall is given over to the food and takes part in its digestion. On such grounds, the occultists of all times have given certain names to these organs. Now, I beg of you most earnestly not to think of anything special for the time being in connection with these names, but rather to think of them only as names that were originally given to these organs and to disregard the fact that the names signify also something else in connection with these organs. Later on we shall see why just these names were chosen. Because the spleen is the first of the three organs to present itself to the blood—we can say this by way of a purely external comparison—it appeared to the occultists of old to be best designated by the name belonging to that star which, to these ancient occultists and their observations, was the first within our solar system to show itself in cosmic space. For this reason they called the spleen “saturnine,” or an inner Saturn in man; and, similarly, the liver they called an inner Jupiter; and the gallbladder, an inner Mars. Let us begin by thinking of nothing in connection with these names, except that we have chosen them because we have arrived at the concept, at first hypothetical, that the external worlds, which otherwise are accessible rather to our senses, have been contracted into these organs and that in these organs inner worlds, so to speak, come to meet us, just as outer worlds meet us in the planets. We may now be able to say that, just as the external worlds show themselves to our senses in that they press in upon us from outside, so do these inner worlds show themselves as acting upon the blood-system in that they influence that for which the blood-system is there.

We shall find, to be sure, a significant difference between what we spoke of yesterday as the peculiarities of the human brain and that which here appears to us as a sort of inner cosmic system. This difference lies simply in the fact that man, to begin with, knows nothing about what takes place within his lower organism: that is, he knows nothing about the impressions which the inner worlds, or planets, as we may call them, make upon him, whereas the very characteristic of the other experience is that the outer worlds do make their impressions upon his consciousness. In a certain respect, therefore, we may call these inner worlds the realm of the unconscious, in contrast to the conscious realm we have learned to know in the life of the brain.

Now, precisely that which lies in this “conscious” and this “unconscious” is more clearly explained when we employ something else to assist us. We all know that external science states that the organ of consciousness is the nerve-system, together with all that pertains to it. Now we must bear in mind, as a basis for our occult study, a certain relationship which the nerve-system has to the blood-system, that is, to what we have to-day considered in a sketchy way. We then see that our nerve-system everywhere enters in certain ways into relation with our blood-system, that the blood everywhere presses upon our nerve-system. Moreover, we must here first take notice of something which external science in this connection holds to be already established. This science looks upon it as a settled matter that in the nerve-system is to be found the sole and entire regulator of all activity of consciousness, of everything, that is, which we characterise as “soul-life.” We cannot here refrain from recalling, although at first only by way of allusion for the purpose of authenticating this later on, that for the occultist the nerve-system exists only as a sort of basis for consciousness. For precisely in the same way that the nerve-system is a part of our organism and comes into contact with the blood-system, or at least bears a certain relation to it, so do the ego and that which we call the astral body make themselves a part of the whole human being. And even an external observation, which has frequently been employed in my lectures, can show us that the nerve-system is in a certain way a manifestation of the astral body. Through such an observation we can see that, in the case of ordinary inanimate beings in nature, we can ascribe only a physical body to that part of their being which they present to us. When, however, we ascend from inanimate, inorganic natural bodies to animate natural bodies, to organisms, we are obliged to suppose that these organisms are permeated by the so-called ether-body, or life-body, which contains in itself the causes of the phenomena of life. We shall see later on that anthroposophy, or occultism, does not speak of the ether-body, or life-body, in the same way that people in the past spoke of “life-force.” Rather does anthroposophy, when it speaks of the ether-body, speak of some thing which the spiritual eye actually sees, that is, of something real underlying the external physical body. When we consider the plants we are obliged to attribute to them an ether-body. And, if we ascend from the plants to sentient beings, to the animals, we find that it is this element of sentiency, of inner life, or, better still, of inner experience, which primarily differentiates the animal externally from the plant. If mere life-activity, which cannot yet sense itself inwardly, cannot yet attain to the kindling of feeling, is to be able to kindle feeling, to sense life inwardly, the astral body must become a part of the animal's organism. And in the nerve-system, which the plants do not yet have, we must recognise the external instrument of the astral body, which in turn is the spiritual prototype of the nerve-system. As the archetype is related to its manifestation, to its image, so is the astral body related to the nerve-system.

Now when we come to man—and I said yesterday that in occultism our task is not as simple as it is for the external scientific method in which everything can, so to speak, be jumbled together—we must always, when we study the human organs, be aware of the fact that these organs, or systems of organs, are capable of being put to certain uses for which the corresponding systems of organs in the animal organism, even when these appear similar, cannot be used. At this point we shall merely affirm in advance what will appear later as having a still more profound basis, that, in the case of man, we must designate the blood as an external instrument for the ego, for all that we denote as our innermost soul-centre, the ego; so that in the nerve-system we have an external instrument of the astral body, and in our blood an external instrument of the ego. Just as the nerve-system in our organism enters into certain relations with the blood, so do those inner regions of the soul which we experience in ourselves as concepts, feelings or sensations, etc., enter into a certain relation with our ego.

The nerve-system is differentiated in the human organism in manifold ways the inner nerve-fibres for example, at the points where these develop into nerves of hearing, of seeing, etc., show us how diverse are its differentiations. Thus the nerve-system is something that reaches out everywhere through the organism in such a way as to comprise the most manifold inner diversities. When we observe the blood as it streams through the organism it shows us, even taking into account the transformation from red into blue blood, that it is, nevertheless, a unity in the whole organism. Having this character of unity, it comes into contact with the differentiated nerve-system, just as does the ego with the differentiated soul-life, for it also is made up of conceptions, sensations, will-impulses, feelings and the like. The further you pursue this comparison—and it is given meanwhile only as a comparison—the more clearly you will be shown that a far-reaching similarity exists in the relations of the two archetypes, the ego and the astral body, to their respective images, the blood-system and the nerve-system. Now, of course, one may say at this point that blood is surely everywhere blood. At the same time, it undergoes a change in flowing through the organism; and consequently we can draw a parallel between these changes that take place in the blood and what goes on in the ego. But our ego is a unity. As far back as we can remember in our life between birth and death we can say: “This ego was always present, in our fifth year just as in our sixth year, yesterday just as to-day. It is the same ego.” And yet, if we now look into what this ego contains, we shall discover this fact: This ego that lives in me is filled with a sum-total of conceptions, sensations, feelings, etc., which are to be attributed to the astral body and which comes into contact with the ego. A year ago this ego was filled with a different content, yesterday it contained still another, and to-day its content is again different. Thus the ego, we see, comes into contact with the entire soul-content, streams through this entire soul-content. And, just as the blood streams through the whole organism and comes everywhere into contact with the differentiated nerve-system, so does the ego come together with the differentiated life of the soul, in conceptions, feelings, will-impulses and the like. Already, therefore, this merely comparative method of study shows us that there is a certain justification in looking upon the blood system as an image of the ego, and the nerve system as an image of the astral body, as higher, super-sensible members of the nature of man.

It is necessary for us to remember that the blood streams throughout the organism in the manner already indicated; that on the one side it presents itself to the outer world like a tablet facing the impressions of the outer world; on the other side, it faces what we have called the inner world. And so indeed it is with our ego also. We first direct this ego of ours toward the outside world and receive impressions from it. There results from this a great variety of content within the ego; it is filled with these impressions coming from outside. There are also such moments when the ego retires within itself and is given up to its pain and suffering, pleasure and happiness, inner feelings and so forth, when it permits to arise in the memory what it is not receiving at this moment directly through contact with the external world, but what it carries within itself. Thus, in this connection also, we find a parallel between the blood and the ego; for the blood, like a tablet, presents itself at one time to the outside world and at another time to the inner world; and we could accordingly represent this ego by a simple sketch [see earlier drawing] exactly as we have represented the blood. We can bring the external impressions which the ego receives, when we think of them as concepts, as soul-pictures in general, into the same sort of relation to the ego as that which we have brought about between our blood and the real external occurrences coming to us through the senses. That is, exactly as we have done in the case of the physical bodily life and the blood, so could we bring what is related to the soul-life into connection with the ego.

Let us now observe from this standpoint the cooperation, the mutual interaction, between the blood and the nerves. If we consider the eye, we see that outer impressions act upon this organ. The impressions of colour and light act upon the optic nerve. So long as they affect the optic nerve, having for themselves an active instrument in the nerve-system, we are able to affirm that they have an effect upon the astral body. We may state that, at the moment when a connection takes place between the nerves and the blood, the parallel process which takes place in the soul is, that the manifold conceptions within the life of the soul come into connection with the ego. When, therefore, we consider this relationship between the nerves and the blood, we may represent by another sketch how that which streams in from outside through the nerves when we see an object, forms a certain connection with those courses of the blood which come into the neighbourhood of the optic nerve.

This connection is something of extraordinary importance for us, if we wish to observe the human organism in such a way that our observation shall provide a basis for arriving at the occult foundations of human nature. In ordinary life the process that takes place is such that each influence transmitted by means of the nerves inscribes itself in the blood, as on a tablet, and in doing so records itself in the instrument of the ego. Let us suppose for a moment, however, that we should artificially interrupt the connection between the nerve and the circulation of the blood, that is, that we should artificially put a man in such a condition that the activity of the nerve should be severed from the circulation of the blood, so that they could no longer act upon each other. We can indicate this by a diagram in which the two parts are shown more widely separated, so that a reciprocal action between the nerves and the blood can no longer take place. In this case the condition may be such that no impression can be made upon the nerve. Something of this sort can be brought about if, for example, the nerve is cut. If, indeed, it should come to pass by some means that no impression is made upon the nerve, then it is also not strange if the man himself is unable to experience anything especial through this nerve. But let us suppose that in spite of the interrupting of the connection between the nerve and the blood a certain impression is made upon the nerve. This can be brought to pass through an external experiment by stimulating the nerve by means of an electric current. Such external influence on the nerve does not, however, concern us here. But there is still another way of affecting the nerve under conditions in which it cannot act upon the course of the blood normally connected with it.

It is possible to bring about such a condition of the human organism; and this is done in a particular way, by means of certain concepts, emotions and feelings which the human being has experienced and made a part of himself, and which, if this inner experiment is to be truly successful, ought, properly speaking, to be really lofty, moral or intellectual concepts. When a man practises a rigorous inner concentration of the soul on such imaginative concepts, forming these into symbols let us say, it then happens, if he does this in a state of waking consciousness, that he takes complete control of the nerve and, as a result of this inner concentration, draws it back to a certain extent from the course of the blood. For when man simply gives himself up to normal, external impressions, the natural connection between the nerve and the circulation is present; but if, in strict concentration upon his ego, he holds fast to what he obtains in a normal way, apart from all external impressions and apart from what the outside world brings about in the ego, he then has something in his soul which can have originated only in the consciousness and is the content of consciousness, and which makes a special demand upon the nerve and separates its activity then and there from its connection with the activity of the blood. The consequence of this is that, by means of such inner concentration, which actually breaks the connection between the nerve and the blood, that is, when it is so strong that the nerve is in a certain sense freed from its connection with the blood-system, the nerve is at the same time freed from that for which the blood is the external instrument, namely, from the ordinary experiences of the ego. And it is, indeed, a fact—this finds its complete experimental support through the inner experiences of that spiritual training designed to lead upward into the higher worlds—that as a result of such concentration the entire nerve-system is removed from the blood-system and from its ordinary tasks in connection with the ego. It then happens, as the particular consequence of this, that whereas the nerve-system had previously written its action upon the tablet of the blood, it now permits what it contains within itself as working power to return into itself, and does not permit it to reach the blood. It is, therefore, possible purely through processes of inner concentration, to separate the blood-system from the nerve-system, and thereby to cause that which, pictorially expressed, would otherwise have flowed into the ego, to course back again into the nerve-system.

Now, the peculiar thing is that once the human being actually brings this about through such inward exertion of the soul, he has then an entirely different sort of inner experience. He stands before a completely changed horizon of consciousness which may be described somewhat as follows: When the nerve and the blood have an appropriate connection with each other, as is the case in normal life, man brings into relation with the ego the impressions which come from within his inner being and those which come from the outer world. The ego then conserves those forces which reach out along the entire horizon of consciousness, and everything is related to the ego. But when, through inner concentration, he separates his nerve-system, lifts it, that is to say, through inner soul-forces out of his blood-system, he does not then live in his ordinary ego. He cannot then say “I” with respect to that which he calls his “Self,” in the same sense in which he had previously said “I” in his ordinary normal consciousness. It then seems to the man as if he had quite consciously lifted a portion of his real being out of himself, as if something which he does not ordinarily see, which is super-sensible and works in upon his nerves, does not now impress itself upon his blood-tablet or make any impression upon his ordinary ego. He feels himself lifted away from the entire blood-system, raised up, as it were, out of his organism; and he meets something different as a substitute for what he has experienced in the blood-system. Whereas the nerve-activity was previously imaged in the blood-system, it is now reflected back into itself. He is now living in something different; he feels himself in another ego, another Self, which before this could at best be merely divined. He feels a super-sensible world uplifted within him.

If once more we draw a sketch, showing the relation between the blood and the nerve, or the entire nerve-system, as this receives into itself the impressions from the outside world, this may be done in the following way.

The normal impressions would then image themselves in the blood-system, and thus be within it. If, however, we have removed the nerve-system, nothing goes as far as the tablet of the blood, nothing goes into the blood-system; everything flows back again into the nerve-system; and thus a world has opened to us of which we had previously no intimation. It has opened as far as the terminations of our nerve-system, and we feel the recoil. To be sure, only he can feel this recoil who goes through the necessary soul-exercises. In the case of the normal consciousness, man feels that he takes into himself whatever sort of world happens to face him, so that everything is inscribed upon the blood-system as on a tablet, and he then lives in his ego with these impressions. In the other case, however, he goes with these impressions only to that point where the terminations of the nerves offer him an inner resistance. Here, at the nerve-terminals, he rebounds as it were, and experiences himself in the outside world. Thus, when we have a colour impression, which we receive through the eye, it passes into the optic nerve, images itself upon the tablet of the blood, and we feel what we express as a fact when we say: “I see red.” But now, after we have made ourselves capable of doing so, let us suppose that we do not go with our impressions as far as the blood, but only to the terminations of the nerves; that at this point we rebound into our inner life, rebound before we reach the blood. In that case we live, as a matter of fact, only as far as our eye, our optic nerve. We recoil before the bodily expression of our blood, we live outside our Self and are actually within the light-rays which penetrate our eyes. Thus we have actually come out of ourselves; indeed, we have accomplished this by reason of the fact that we do not penetrate as deep down into our Self as we ordinarily do, but rather go only as far as the nerve-terminals. The effect on a soul-life such as this, if we have brought it to the stage where we turn back at the terminations of the nerves into our inner being, so that we do not go as far as our blood, is that we have in this case disconnected the blood; whereas otherwise the normal consciousness of the inner man ordinarily goes down into the blood, and the soul-life identifies itself with the physical man, feels itself at one with him.

As a result of these external observations we have to-day succeeded in disconnecting the entire blood-system, which we have thought of as a kind of tablet that presents itself on the one side to the external, on the other side to the internal impressions, from what we may call the higher man, the man we may become if we find release from our Selves and become free. Now, we shall best be able to study the whole inner nature of this blood-system if we do not make use of general phrases, but observe what exists as reality in man, namely, the super-sensible, invisible man to whom we can lift ourselves when we go only as far as the terminations of our nerves, and if we also observe man as he is when he goes all the way into the blood. For we can then advance further, to the thought that man can really live in the outside world, that he can pour himself out over the whole external world, can go forth into this world and view from the reverse standpoint, as it were, the inner man, or what is usually meant by that term. In short, we shall learn to know the functions of the blood, and of those organs which are inserted into the circulatory course of the blood, when we can answer the following questions: What does a more accurate knowledge show us, when that which comes from a higher world, to which man can raise himself, is portrayed upon the tablet of the blood? It shows us that everything connected with the life of the blood is the very central point of the human being, when, without coining phrases, but rather looking only at sensible as well as super-sensible realities, we consider carefully the relationship of this wonderful system to a higher world. For this is in truth to be our task: to learn to see clearly the whole visible physical Man as an image of that other “Man” who is rooted and lives in the spiritual world. We shall thereby come to find that the human organism is one of the truest images of that Spirit which lives in the universe, and we shall attain to a very special understanding of that Spirit.

These first three lectures, including to-day's, are intended to orient us in a general way in regard to what must be considered in connection with the life of man, with his true being. For this reason some of the more important concepts first given out are, in a sense, left hanging in the air, since the more detailed exposition of these will naturally have to follow later. But it is better to make a general survey of the whole method of occult observation of the human being and afterwards to build into our study, which for the present we accept only as hypothetical, that which will then appear to us as its deeper foundations.

I have already dwelt upon one matter, at the close of yesterday's lecture. I there endeavoured to show that, by means of certain soul-exercises, by means of strict concentration of thought and feeling, the human being can call forth a state of life different from the ordinary one. The ordinary state expresses itself as it does because in our fully waking day consciousness, we have a normal connection between the nerves and the blood. That which happens by way of the nerves inscribes itself upon the tablet of the blood. By means of soul-exercises, a man may reach the point where he can so completely control the nerve that it does not extend its activity as far as the blood. This activity is thrown back into the nerve itself. But now, because the blood is the instrument of the ego, a person who does this, who has freed his nerve-system from the course of the blood through strict concentration of feeling and thought, feels as if he were estranged from his own accustomed being, lifted out of it. He feels as if he now stood facing himself, with the result that he can no longer say to this familiar being of his, “This is I”; he must say, “That is you.” Thus he stands facing his own Self just as he might face any unfamiliar person living in the physical world.

A man like this, who has become in a certain sense clairvoyant, feels as if a higher order of being were towering up in his soul-life. This is an entirely different feeling from that which a man has when he confronts the ordinary world. When he confronts the external world, he feels that he stands as a stranger facing the things and beings of this external world, the animals, the plants, etc.—as a being who stands beside them or outside them. He knows quite definitely when he has a flower before him: “The flower is there, and I am here.” It is otherwise when, as a result of the liberation from his nerve-system, he ascends into the spiritual world, when he lifts himself out of his ego. He does not any longer feel in that case: “There is the plant-being that faces me, and here am I,” but rather as if the other being entered completely into him, and as if he felt himself one with it. Thus we may say that the clairvoyant human being learns, through advanced power of observation, to know the spiritual world—that spiritual world with which man is, indeed, united and which to a certain extent, comes to meet him by way of the nerve-system, even though in normal life this occurs by the indirect road of the sense-impressions. It is the spiritual world, therefore, about which the human being in his ordinary consciousness at first knows nothing, and it is this same spiritual world which, nevertheless, actually inscribes itself upon the tablet of our blood, hence upon our ego. In other words, we may say that underlying everything that surrounds us externally in the world of sense there lies a spiritual world, so that we see as though through a veil woven by the sense-impressions. In our normal consciousness, which is compassed by the horizon of our ordinary ego, we do not see the spiritual world lying behind this veil. The moment, however, that we free ourselves of the ego, the ordinary sense-impressions disappear also. We then begin to live in a spiritual world above us, that same world that exists in reality behind the sense-impressions, and with which we become one when we lift our nerve-system out of our ordinary blood-system.

We have now followed in a manner the process of human life, how it is stimulated from the external world and how it carries on its work through the nerves and the blood. At the same time, we have called attention to the fact that we can see in the purely organic, physical inner life of man a kind of “compressed outside world”; and we have pointed in particular to the fact that such an outside world, condensed into organs, is present in our liver, our gall-bladder, and our spleen. We may say, therefore, that just as the blood in the one direction, in the upper extremity of our organism, courses through the brain in order there to come into contact with the outside world (this takes place by reason of the fact that the external sense-impressions work upon the brain) just so, as it circulates through the body, does it come into relationship with the inner organs among which we have first considered the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen. The blood does not in these organs come into contact with any sort of outside world because they do not open outward as do the organs of sense, but are enclosed within the organism, are covered on all sides and consequently develop only an inner life. Moreover, these organs can act upon the blood only in accordance with their own nature as liver, gall-bladder, spleen. They do not, like the eye or the ear, receive outside impressions, and they cannot, therefore, pass on to the blood influences stimulated from outside, but can simply express their own particular natures through whatever effect these may have upon the blood. When we observe this inner world into which the outside world is condensed, as it were, we may state that here an outer world which has become an inner world acts upon the human blood where it can act at all.

If we draw a sketch of this, and represent the tablet of the blood by the line A B, we have to represent everything which comes from outside as now directed in a certain sense inward, and pressing from the one direction against the tablet of the blood, while being, as it were, inscribed upon one side of the tablet, whereas everything coming from the inside we have to think of as approaching from the other direction and inscribing itself on the other side of the tablet. Or doing it less schematically, we might then take the human head and observe the blood as it courses through this in such a way that we say: “It is being written upon from outside through the sense-organs; and the brain, in performing its task, has the same sort of transforming influence upon the blood as the inner organs have.” For these three organs, the liver, the gall-bladder and the spleen, work, as we know, from the opposite direction, from the other side, upon the blood flowing into them. Thus it would seem that the blood may be able to receive radiations and influences from the inner organs, and by this means, supposing this to be possible, it can, as the instrument of the ego, bring to expression in this ego the inner life of these organs, just as everything which surrounds us in the world outside finds expression in the life of our brain.

At this point we must understand clearly, that something else very definite must happen to make possible the action of these organs upon the blood. Let us remember that we had to assert that only through the reciprocal activity, through the connection between the nerve and the course of the blood, can there be any possibility whatever that anything will be inscribed upon the blood, that any influence can be exercised upon it. If therefore from the other direction, from the inner side, influences are to be exercised upon the blood, if the inner organs, or what we may call man's inner cosmic system, are to work upon the blood, there must be inserted between these organs and the blood something similar to a nerve-system. The “inner world” must first be able to act upon a nerve-system if it is to carry its activity over to the blood. Thus we see, by simply comparing the lower portion of the human being with the upper, that we are forced to presuppose that something in the nature of a nerve-system must be inserted between the circulating blood and our inner organs—among which we have here these three representative ones, the liver, the gallbladder, and the spleen.

External observation shows us that this really is the case, that in all these organs is inserted what is called the “sympathetic nervous system” which extends throughout the bodily cavity of man, and which stands in a relationship to his inner world and to the course of the blood similar to that in which the nervous system of the spinal cord stands to the great outside world and to the life of man, to the circulation of his blood. This sympathetic nervous system passes first along the spine and, going out from there, traverses the most widely separated parts of the organism and branches out, spreading into reticular forms, especially in the abdominal cavity, where one part of it goes by the popular name of the “solar plexus.” We may expect to find a certain variation of this system from the other nerve-system. It is always interesting, even if it should not serve as any proof, to ask ourselves: What would be the relation between this nerve-system and the nerve-system of the spinal cord if those conditions should be fulfilled which we have for the present asserted hypothetically? It would be obvious that, just as the nerve-system of the spinal cord must open itself to surrounding space, so would this sympathetic nerve-system have to incline toward what is compressed into the inner organisation. Thus the nerve-system of the spinal cord is related to the sympathetic nerve-system, that is, if the facts agree with our presuppositions, somewhat as lines radiating outward in all directions from the circumference of a circle (a) would be related to those radii that we might direct away from the centre of the circle toward its circumference (b). In a certain sense, therefore, there would have to be an antithesis between the sympathetic nerve-system and the nerve-system of the brain and spinal cord. This antithesis actually does exist. We see here that it may be of great value to us to be able to point to the fact that, if our assumptions are correct, experience and observation will in a manner confirm them. And, when we turn our attention again to what we have been observing, it is evident that external observation does confirm the suppositions we have formed. We find that, whereas in the case of the sympathetic nerve-system the essential thing is that ganglia of a certain kind form themselves which are strong and large, while the connecting filaments radiating out from these are relatively small and of little account in contrast to these ganglia, exactly the reverse is true in the case of the nerve-system of the brain and spinal cord. There the connecting threads are the important thing, whereas the ganglia have a subordinate significance.

Thus our observation does, in fact, confirm what we accepted as a supposition, and we can now make the following assertion. If the function of the sympathetic nerve-system must consist in carrying over to the blood the inner life of the human organism, which expresses itself in the nourishing and the warming through of the organism, and which pours itself into the sympathetic nerves, in exactly the same way in which the outer impressions are carried over to the tablet of the blood by means of the nerve-system of the brain and spinal cord, in that case we obtain through the instrument of the ego, which is the blood, by the roundabout way of the sympathetic nerve-system, the impressions of our own inner body. Since however this inner body of ours, like everything physical, is built up out of the spirit, we therefore take up into our ego, by the roundabout road of the sympathetic nerve-system, what has been condensed as spiritual world into the corresponding organs of the inner world of man.

Thus we see here also, strangely enough, how that duality in the human being with which we began our studies is expressed in even greater exactness. We see the world at one moment outside; at another moment we see it inside. Both times we see this world working in such a way that it uses a nerve-system as the instrument of its work. We see that in the centre, between the outside world and the inside world, is placed our blood-system which exposes its two sides, to be written upon like a tablet, sometimes from outside, sometimes from inside.

We said yesterday and repeat to-day for the sake of clarity, that the human being is in position to free his nerves, in so far as these lead to the outside world, from their action upon the blood-system. We must now put the question, whether something similar is possible also in the other direction. And we shall see later that it is possible, as a matter of fact, to practise also other exercises of the soul that are capable of producing in the other direction the same effect as that of which we have spoken. There is one difference, however, in connection with the effect produced in this other direction. Whereas we are able through concentration of thought, concentration of feeling, and occult exercises, to set free from the blood the nerves of our brain and spinal cord, we are able, on the other hand, by means of such concentrations as go right down into our inner life, our inner world—by which is meant in particular that sort of concentration included under the term “the mystical life,”—to penetrate so deep down within ourselves that in doing so we most certainly do not ignore our ego, nor therefore its instrument the blood. The mystical immersion, concerning which we know that by its means a man plunges down, so to speak, into his own divine being, into his own spirituality in so far as this is alive in him, this mystical immersion is not primarily a lifting of oneself out of the ego. It is rather a positive plunging of oneself down into the ego, a strengthening or energising of the ego-feeling. We can convince ourselves of this if we set aside what the mystics of the present day may say, and consider to some extent the earlier mystics.

These earlier mystics, whether they had for their foundation more of reality or less matters not, endeavoured, above all things, to penetrate into their own ego and to look away from everything which the outside world could offer, in order to be free from all external impressions and to plunge down completely into themselves. This inward self-communion, this diving down into one's own ego, is primarily a concentration or drawing down of the entire force and energy of the ego into one's own organism. This now works further upon the entire organisation of the human being; and we may say that this inward immersion, which may be called in the true sense of the term the “mystic path,” is in direct contrast to that other path leading out into the macrocosm, so that we do not draw the instrument of the ego, which is the blood, away from the nerve, but on the contrary thrust it more than ever against the sympathetic nerve-system. Whereas, therefore, we loosen by means of the process described yesterday the connection between the nerve and the blood, we here strengthen the connection between the blood and the sympathetic nerve-system by means of true mystic immersion.

This is the physiological counterpart: that the blood is here pressed in more than ever against the sympathetic nerve-system whereas, when the wish is to reach the spiritual world in the other way, the blood is pushed away from the nerve. Thus we see that what can take place in the mystic immersion is primarily an impressing of the blood upon this inner, sympathetic nerve-system.

Now, let us suppose that we might disregard what happens when a man thus enters into his inner being, when he does not free himself from his ego, but presses down, on the contrary, into the ego, and takes with him at the same time all his less desirable qualities. For when a man frees himself from his ego he leaves the ego behind with all these less desirable qualities; but when he immerses himself into his ego it is not at all certain, to begin with, that he does not at the same time press down all his undesirable characteristics into this energised ego of his: in other words, that everything contained in his passionate blood is not pressed down with the blood into the sympathetic nerve-system. But let us suppose that we might for the time being disregard all this, and assume that the mystic has taken care, before coming to any such mystic immersion, that his less desirable qualities shall have disappeared more and more and that, in place of these egoistic qualities, selfless, altruistic feelings have appeared; that he has prepared himself by endeavouring to bring to life within himself a feeling of compassion for all things possessed of being to the end that, by means of the selfless qualities that have thus been called forth for all beings, he may paralyse these other qualities that take account only of the ego. Let us suppose, then, that the man has prepared himself sufficiently for this immersion within his own inner being. He carries his ego in that case by means of the instrument of his blood down into his own inner world. It then comes to pass that his inner nerve-system, the sympathetic nerve-system, about which the human being in his normal consciousness knows nothing, presses its way into the ego-consciousness, so that he begins to know: “I have within me something which can mediate to me the inner world in the same way that the other nerve-system mediates to me the outer world.”

Thus man descends into his own being and becomes aware, so to speak, of his sympathetic nerve-system. And just as he can know, by means of the outer nerve-system of the brain and spinal cord, the outside world that forms his environment, so there now comes to meet him that inner world which has built itself up within him. Moreover, just as we do not see the nerves, since no one sees the optic nerve, but rather that which is to be seen by means of the nerve, the external world that penetrates into our consciousness, just so also in the case of the mystic immersion it is not, to begin with, the inner nerves that penetrate the consciousness, for the human being is aware only that he has in these an instrument through which he can behold what is within him. It is indeed, something quite different that appears. Now that he has brought his faculty of cognition to an inward clairvoyance, his inner world appears before him. Just as the outward-directed look discloses to us the outer world, and our nerves do not in the process come into our consciousness, so likewise it is not our sympathetic nerve-system that comes into our consciousness, but obviously that which confronts us as “inner world.” Only, this inner world which here comes into our consciousness is really our own Self as physical man.

Perhaps it is not so much to the point here, but I should feel inclined to suggest that a thinker who is the least materialistic might, indeed, sense a feeling of horror rising up within him if he were to say to himself: “In that case I can see my own organism inside me!” And what he might mean, perhaps, would be: “How wonderful, to become clairvoyant by means of my sympathetic nerve-system and to be able to see my own liver, gall-bladder, and spleen!” As I remarked, this is not necessarily to the point, yet someone might say such a thing. But the facts are otherwise. For, in making an objection like this, such a person would fail to take into account that what the human being ordinarily calls in external life his liver, his gall-bladder, and his spleen is viewed from outside, just like all other external objects. In ordinary life we are obliged to view the human organism through the external senses, the outer nerves. What we may learn to know in anatomy, in the usual physiology, as liver, gall-bladder, and spleen constitutes these organs as seen from outside by means of the nerve-system of the brain and spinal cord. There they are viewed in exactly the same way in which one views anything externally. The position is entirely different, however, when a man can see clairvoyantly inside himself by means of the sympathetic nerve-system. He does not in that case see at all the same things that one sees when looking from outside; rather, he now sees something which caused the seers throughout the ages to choose such strange names as those I cited in the second lecture.

He is now aware that in reality, to external sight which uses the brain and the spinal cord, these organs appear in Maya, in external illusion, because the aspect they offer outwardly does not show them in their inner essential significance. He sees, in fact, something entirely different when he is able to observe this his inner world from the opposite direction, but now with the use of an inwardly clairvoyant eye. He now gradually realises why the seers of all times connected the activity of the spleen with the action of Saturn, the activity of the liver with the action of Jupiter, and the activity of the gallbladder with the action of Mars. For what he thus sees in his own inner self is, indeed, fundamentally different from what presents itself to the external view. He becomes aware that he actually has before him portions of the outside world enclosed within the boundaries of his inner organs.

And one thing now becomes particularly clear, which may serve us chiefly as an example for this method of arriving at knowledge, enabling us to see what course these ways of attaining knowledge follow in the life of the organism, in leading us beyond the customary views. In this case we can convince ourselves especially with regard to one fact, namely, how very significant an organ the human spleen is. Indeed, this organ really appears to inner observation as if it did not consist of an externally visible substance, of fleshly matter, but rather, if the expression may be permitted, although it approximates only to what can actually be observed, as if it actually were a luminous cosmic body in miniature with every possible sort of inner life, and indeed an inner life highly complicated.

Yesterday I called your attention to the fact that the spleen, externally observed, may be described as a plethoric tissue with minute white corpuscles embedded in it, so that it is legitimate, perhaps, from the point of view of external observation, to assume that the blood which flows through the spleen is strained through it as if through a sieve. When this spleen is observed inwardly, on the other hand, it appears above all to be an organ which, by means of the manifold inner forces already mentioned, is brought into a continual rhythmic movement. We convince ourselves even in connection with such an organ as this that a very great deal in the world is, as a matter of fact, dependent upon rhythm. An intimation of the importance of rhythm in the entire life of the world may be felt when we recognise it also externally in the pulse-beat of the blood. In that case, however, it is externally that we recognise it. But we can follow it externally also in the spleen. For it is possible here to follow it rather exactly, and we can also look for confirmation of what has been said through external observation. To inward clairvoyant sight all the differentiations of the spleen, which take place as if in a luminous body, are there in order to give this spleen a certain rhythm in life. This rhythm differs very considerably from other rhythms that we perceive elsewhere in life. Indeed it is just here, in the case of the spleen, that it is interesting to observe how very noticeably this rhythm differs from others: that is, it is far less regular than the other rhythms of which we shall speak later. This is due to the fact that the spleen lies near the human nutritive apparatus, and has something to do with this.

Now, you will be able to understand me if you consider how amazingly regular the rhythm of the blood must be in the human being in order that life may be properly sustained. This must be a very regular rhythm. But there is another rhythm that is regular only to a very slight degree—although one could wish that, through self-education of the human being, it might become more and more regular especially in the life of the child—namely, the rhythm of eating and drinking. Any man of moderately regular habits does, to be sure, keep a certain rhythm in this respect. He takes his breakfast, his midday meal, and his evening meal at certain times, and by doing so he follows, of course, a certain rhythm. But we know, alas, how it is with this rhythm in many another respect, through the humouring of the fastidiousness of many children who are simply given a thing whenever they crave it, regardless of all rhythm. Moreover, the fact that adults also are not very particular in observing a regular rhythm in connection with eating and drinking—there is not the slightest intention here of giving pedantic instruction in this matter, for our modern life does not always allow of rhythm—the fact that we fill ourselves with external nourishment with such irregularity, and that in our drinking especially we are so irregular, is sufficiently well known and need not be criticised but only mentioned. Yet, on the other hand, that which we supply to our organism with such imperfect rhythm must gradually be changed in rhythm so that it will adapt itself to the more regular rhythm of this organism, it must be adapted, as it were. The grossest irregularity must be removed, and something like the following must come about. Let us suppose that, in order to regulate his daily schedule, a man is compelled to breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning and to eat again at one or two o'clock and assume that this has become a habit. Now, suppose that he should go to see a friend, and that while there he should be invited, through a courtesy which cannot in general be too highly praised, to take something between these two meals. In this case he has interrupted his rhythm to a very decided extent, and thereby a certain positive influence is exerted upon the rhythm of his external organism.

Now there must be something able to strengthen correspondingly whatever is regular in rhythm in the supplying of external nourishment and to weaken the influence of whatever is irregularly introduced. The worst irregularities must be counterbalanced. Accordingly somewhere along the course taken by the food as it goes over into the rhythm of the blood, there must be inserted an organ that equalises the irregularity of the process of nourishment in contrast with the necessary regularity of the rhythm of the blood. This organ is the spleen. Thus, by observing certain very definite rhythmic processes brought about by the spleen we are able to get an idea of the fact that the spleen is really a “transformer.”¹ It is there to counterbalance the irregularities in the digestive canal in order that they may become regularities in the circulation of the blood. For it would be fatal, especially in one's student days but also at other times, if certain irregularities in the taking of nutritive matter had necessarily to continue to the full extent of their action into the blood! There is much to be counterbalanced by means of a “backward thrust,” as we may call it; only so much is to be conducted over into the blood as is useful to it. This is the function of the spleen, that organ inserted in the blood-stream which so radiates its rhythm-bringing influence over the entire human organism as to produce the condition that has just been described. To external observation, all that we have obtained through the insight of an eye becoming inwardly clairvoyant is evident from the fact that the spleen does keep to a certain rhythm that actually reminds one, even if only slightly, of what I have just been stating. For it is extraordinarily difficult to find out the functions of the spleen by means of external physiological investigation. Outwardly, the only thing that shows itself is that the spleen is to a certain extent inflated for hours at a time after the partaking of a heavy meal; and that, if another meal does not follow, it contracts again.

Here you have a certain expanding and contracting of this organ. When it is realised that the human organism is not what it is often described as being, namely, a mere sum-total of the organs contained within it, but that all the organs send their most secret activities to all parts of the organism, one will then be able also to conceive how the rhythmic movements of the spleen, although dependent, of course, upon the outside world, that is, upon the supply of food, radiate throughout the whole organism and have a counterbalancing influence upon it. Now this is only one of the ways in which the spleen functions. It is impossible to explain all of them at once. Yet it would nevertheless, be extraordinarily interesting, since not everybody is capable of becoming clairvoyant, if such facts could be accepted by external physiology, accepted, let us say, as possible ideas, so that people would say: “I will for once imagine that what is attained by means of the inner clairvoyant eye is, after all, not such complete nonsense as it is often supposed to be. On the contrary, I shall neither believe nor disbelieve this; but I shall let it remain as an idea presented to me, and shall then investigate what external physiology can point out, whether, out of all that is asserted by occultists, anything whatever can be substantiated by showing clearly that it is actually confirmed by external observation.”²

In a certain sense, what I have just said is such a confirmation. For it has become evident to us that the expansion and contraction of the spleen, due to the inner structure of the organ, have a certain regularity; but that, since these movements follow the eating of a meal, they are dependent also on the supply of external nourishment. Thus we have here in the spleen an organ which is dependent from the one aspect, that of the digestive canal, on external, human will; but from the other aspect, that of the blood, we have in it an organ that sets aside to a certain extent human choice, rejects it, and leads back to a rhythm, indeed, we might say, in this way really forms man in accordance with his being. For, if man is to be fashioned in accordance with his being, it is then especially necessary that the central instrument of that being, the blood, should be able to exercise its activity in the right way, in its own blood-rhythm. The human being, in so far as he is the carrier of his own blood-stream, must be set apart, so to speak, within himself, isolated from what proceeds with irregularity in the outside world, that outside world which he incorporates within himself when he takes in his nourishment out of it. Hence this is a process of isolation, a making the human being independent of the outside world. Every such individualising of any being, making it independent, is called in occultism saturnine, something brought about by the Saturn influence. This, as a matter of fact is the original idea associated with Saturn, that from an existing world some sort of Being is isolated, individualised, in such a way that within itself and of itself it can evolve regularity.

I shall for the present disregard the fact that the astronomy of our day reckons both Uranus and Neptune, which are outside the orbit of Saturn, as belonging to our solar system. For the occultist all those forces present in our entire solar system are, for the purpose of isolating them from the rest of the cosmos and individualising them, to be found in the Saturn forces—in that planet therefore, which is the most remote one belonging to this system. If, then, we visualise the entire solar system, we might say: The solar system must be so placed that it can follow its own laws within the orbit of encircling Saturn, and can make itself independent by tearing itself loose, as it were, from the surrounding world and from the formative forces of this surrounding world. For this reason occultists of all the ages have seen in the Saturn forces that which secludes our solar system within itself, thus making it possible for the solar system to develop a rhythm of its own which is not the same as the rhythm outside the world of our solar system.

In a certain way the spleen does something similar within our organism. Certainly we do not in this organism of ours have to do with a separating from the entire outside world, but only with a separating from this surrounding world in so far as it contains the nourishment for our organism and we ourselves introduce its activities into ourselves. The spleen is the organ we first meet when we do this, dealing, so to speak, with everything from outside in the same way as the Saturn forces deal with everything within our solar system, within the orbit of Saturn. The forces that are in the spleen isolate the circulation of our blood from all outside influences, and make of it a regular rhythm within itself, a system having its own rhythm.

Here we have already come nearer, although we are not yet really near as we shall see later, to those reasons, still more or less external, for which such names as the ones already mentioned are chosen in occultism. They are chosen because the occultist does not connect with the names borne by the planets merely what concerns the planets. When these names were originally created in the occult schools they were never applied merely to the separate planets; the name Saturn, for instance, was applied to anything that excluded a world outside from a system that took on a rhythmic form within itself. There is always a certain disadvantage for cosmic evolution, as a whole, when one system shuts itself off and regulates itself within itself, fashions a rhythm of its own. And the occultists have, consequently, been somewhat concerned about this disadvantage. We might say, indeed, that it is quite comprehensible that all activities in the entire universe have a basic inner relation and are mutually related. If any one “world,” be it a solar system, or be it the blood-system of the human being, is completely separated from the rest of the universe surrounding it, this signifies that it quite independently violates external laws, makes itself independent of them, changes itself and creates its own inner laws, its own rhythm. We shall see later how this may also be true in the case of the human being although it must be clear to us, in view of the whole discussion in to-day's lecture, that it is mostly a blessing that man maintains this inner Saturn-rhythm which the spleen has created for him. At the same time we shall see that we can apply this law also in the case of man, namely, that any being, whether it be a planet or a man, brings itself through seclusion within itself into a state of contradiction to the world around it. A contradiction is thus created between that which surrounds and that which is within the being concerned. This contradiction cannot be compensated for, after it has once appeared, until the inner rhythm set up has again adapted itself completely to the outer rhythm. We shall see that this applies also to the human being; for otherwise, according to what has been said, he would be compelled to adapt himself to irregularity. We shall find, however, that such is not the case. The inner rhythm, although it has established itself, must again strive after doing this to fashion itself in accordance with the entire outside world, which means that it must eliminate itself. Thus the being first comes to have an inner existence of its own; but, because it can now work independently, it aspires to adapt itself to the outside world and to become harmonious with it. To put it in other words, everything that has made itself independent as a result of a saturnine activity is doomed at the same time, because of this saturnine activity, to destroy itself again. Saturn, or Kronos, devours his own children, so the myth tells us. Here you see a deeply significant harmony between an occult idea, expressed in the name Kronos or Saturn, and a myth which expresses the same thing in a picture, a symbol: “Kronos devours his own children!”

We can try, at least, to let such things work upon us; and, if we allow them to do so in ever-increasing number, one new fact after another comes to light till it becomes impossible after a time to say, in the light and easy manner in which we so often hear a superficial solution proposed: “Here are some of these visionaries dreaming that the old myths and sagas contained the pictorial impress of a deeper wisdom!” If a man hears two or three, or let us say even ten, such “correspondences” presented, as these so often are presented in literature in a wholly superficial way, it is of course quite possible for him to oppose the idea that there is a deeper wisdom contained in the myths and sagas than in external science; that mythology leads us deeper into the foundations of things and of Being than do the methods of natural-scientific study. But if he allows such examples to work upon him again and again, and then becomes aware that, throughout the whole extent of the thought and feeling of men and of peoples, it is verified that in pictorial conceptions everywhere and always, over all parts of the earth, anyone with a very accurate observation and devoted interest in sagas and myths may find the metamorphoses of a deeper wisdom, then he will be able to understand why certain occultists can with justice say as they do: “He alone really comprehends the myths and sagas who has penetrated into human nature with the help of occult physiology.” And, indeed, more truly than is the case in external science do even the names in these myths and sagas and other traditions contain real physiology. When once people begin to fathom how much physiology was coined, for instance, in such names as Cain and Abel, and into the names of all their successors in those olden days when it was customary to coin an inner meaning into names, when they once see how much physiology, how much inner understanding for homely human wisdom is contained in those old names in a truly remarkable way, they will then win a tremendous respect and the deepest reverence for everything that has been devised in the course of the historical evolution of man for the purpose of enabling the soul, where it cannot as yet through its own wisdom ascend into the spiritual world, to have a conscious inner experience by means of pictures of its connection with these spiritual worlds. Then will be completely banished that idea which plays too large a part at the present time: “What splendid progress we men of to-day have made!” by which is often also meant: “How well we have succeeded in getting rid of those old pictorial expressions belonging to prehistoric ‘wisdom’!” We shall then cast away such feelings, and immerse ourselves with whole-hearted devotion in the course of human evolution throughout its successive epochs. For what the clairvoyant, with his opened inner eye, establishes physiologically as the inner nature of the human organs, is so expressed in these ancient pictures that the myths and sagas really contain in them the truth of the origin of man. To make possible the expression in pictures of this miraculous process, whereby external worlds have been compressed into human organs and have condensed and crystallised themselves in the course of infinitely long periods of time in order that they might become something which, in the form of a spleen for example, brings about an inner rhythm within us, or in the form of a liver or gall-bladder, etc., as we shall see tomorrow—to be able to express all this in pictures requires a divining of what we, by means of occult science, can re-establish from the human organisation. For what we find there has been born out of the worlds, as a microcosm out of the macrocosm. We look into this whole origin or beginning with the help of occult science on the one hand; and we see on the other that intimations of these beginnings are contained in the myths and sagas, and that those occultists are right who find a real meaning in them only when they are given a physiological foundation.

It is our purpose to-day at least to indicate these facts, if no more; for this can help us to win that reverence of which we spoke in our first hours together. If we practise such a method of study as this, quite apart now from the “pictures” belonging to the different peoples, by also directly pointing to what presents itself to a deeper investigation of the spiritual content of the human organs, if we are able to present this even only to a very limited extent, it will soon become clear to us what a miraculous structure this human organism is. In this series of lectures we shall endeavour to throw a little light upon the inner quality of being of this human organism.

• 1. Figure taken from the electrical device which transforms the character of the current.
• 2. See in this connection Philo and physikalischer Nachweis der Wirksamkeit kleinster Entitäten. L. Kolisko. Orient-Occident Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany.

Our discussion of yesterday, dealing primarily with the significance of one of those organs which represent an “inner cosmic system” of man, will be continued to-day. We shall then find the transition leading to a description of the functions of the other human organs and organic systems.

It was said to me yesterday in connection with my reference to the spleen that there might arise an apparent contradiction as regards the very important function ascribed to the spleen in the entire being of man; that this contradiction might well appear as a result of the reflection that it is possible to take the spleen out of the body, actually to remove it, and yet not leave the man incapable of living.

Such an objection is certainly justified from the standpoint of our contemporaries; indeed, it is unavoidable in view of the fact that certain difficulties present themselves even to those who approach the spiritual-scientific world-conception as thoroughly honest seekers. It was possible to point out only in a general way in our first public lecture¹ how our contemporaries, especially when conscientiously schooled in scientific methods, find difficulties as soon as they choose the road that leads them to an understanding of what may be presented out of the occult depths of cosmic Being.

Now, we shall see in the course of these lectures how, in principle, so to speak, such an objection gradually disappears of itself. I shall, however, to-day call your attention in a prefatory way to the fact that the removal of the spleen from the human organism is thoroughly compatible with everything discussed yesterday. If we really wish to ascend to the truths of spiritual science, we must accustom ourselves gradually to the fact that what we call the human organism, as seen by means of our external senses, and also everything we see in this organism as substance, or it might, perhaps, be better to say as external matter, that all this is not the whole man; but that, underlying man as a physical organism (as we shall explain further) are higher, super-sensible human organisms called the ether-body or life-body, the astral body and the ego; and that we have in this physical organism only the external physical expression for the corresponding formation and processes of the ether-body, the astral body, etc.

When we refer to an organ such as the spleen we think of it in the spiritual-scientific sense, realising that not only does something take place in the external, physical spleen, but that this is merely the physical expression for corresponding processes which take place in the ether-body, for example, or in the astral body. We might say moreover, that the more any one of the organs is the direct expression of the spiritual, the less is the physical form of the organ, that is, what we have before us as physical substance, the determining factor. Just as we find in looking at a pendulum that its movement is merely the physical expression of gravitation, even so is the physical organ merely the physical expression of the super-sensible influences working in force and form—with this difference, however, that in the case of such forces as that of gravitation when we remove the pendulum, which is the physical expression, no inner rhythm due to gravitation can continue. This is the case, of course, in inanimate, inorganic Nature; but not in the same way in animate, organic Nature. When there are no other causes present in the organism as a whole it is not necessary that the spiritual influences should cease with the removal of the physical organ; for this physical organ, in its physical nature, is only a feeble expression of the nature of the corresponding spiritual activities. On this point we shall have more to say later.

Accordingly when we observe the human being, with reference to his spleen, we have to do in the first place, with that organ only; but beyond that with a system of forces working in it which have in the physical spleen only their outward expression. If one removes the spleen, these forces which are integral parts of the organism still continue their work. Their activities do not cease in the way in which, let us say, certain spiritual activities in the human being cease when one removes the brain or a portion of it. It may even be, under certain circumstances, that an organ which has become diseased may cause a much greater hindrance to the continuation of the spiritual activities than is brought about by the removal of the organ concerned. This is true, for example, in the case of a serious disease of the spleen. If it is possible to remove the organ when it becomes seriously diseased, this removal is, under certain conditions, less hindering to the development of the spiritual activities than is the organ itself, which is inwardly diseased and therefore a constant mischief-maker, opposing the development of the underlying spiritual forces.

Such an objection a man may make if he has not yet penetrated very deeply into the real nature of spiritual-scientific knowledge. Though readily understood, this is one of those objections that disappear of themselves when one has time and patience to go more deeply into these matters. You will generally find the following to be true: When anyone approaches what is given out through spiritual science with a certain sort of knowledge gathered from all that belongs to present-day science, contradiction after contradiction may result till finally one can get no further. And, if a man is quick to form opinions, he will certainly not be able to reach any other conclusion than that spiritual science is a sort of madness which does not harmonise in the slightest degree with the results obtained by external science. If, however, a man follows these things with patience, he will see that there is no contradiction, not even of the most minute kind, between what comes forth from spiritual science and what may be presented by external science. The difficulty before us is this, that the field of anthroposophical or spiritual science as a whole is so extensive that it is never possible to present more than a part of it. When people approach such parts they may feel discrepancies such as that which we have described; yet it would be impossible to begin in any other way than this with the much needed bringing of the anthroposophical world-conception into the culture and knowledge of our day.

Yesterday I endeavoured to explain the transformation of rhythm, in the sense I explained, which is undertaken by the spleen in contrast to the rhythmless manner in which human beings take their external nourishment. I took what was said in this connection as my point of departure because it is in itself fundamentally the most easily understood of all the functions belonging to the spleen. We must know, however, that although it is the easiest to understand it is not the most important, it does not constitute the chief thing. For, if it were, people could always say: “Very well, then; if the human being were to take pains to know the right rhythm for his nourishment, the activity of the spleen viewed from this aspect would little by little become unnecessary. From this we see at once that what was described yesterday is the merest trifle. Far more important is the fact that in the process of nourishment we have to do with external substances, external articles of food, their composition and the form and manner in which they exist in our environment. So long as one holds to the conception that these nutritive substances are so much dead bulk, or at best masses containing that sort of life which one generally assumes to be in plants and other articles of food, it may certainly appear as if all that is necessary is for the external substances taken into the organism as nutritive matter to be simply worked over by means of what we call the process of digestion in its broadest sense.

Many people, it is true, imagine that they have to do with some sort of indeterminate substance taken in as food, a substance quite neutral in its relation to us which simply waits, when we have once taken it in, till we are able to digest it. But such is not the case. Articles of food are, after all not just bricks which serve in some sort of way as building material for the construction they are to help in erecting. Bricks are included in the architect's plan in any way he pleases to use them because they represent in relationship to the building a mass in itself quite inert. This is not true, however, of nutritive matter in its relation to the human being. For every particle of substance we have in our environment has certain inner forces, its own conformity to law. This is the essential element in any substance that it has its own inner laws, its own inner activities. Accordingly, when we bring external nutritive substances into our organism, when we insert them into our own inner activity, so to speak, they do not simply consent to this at once as a matter of course but attempt first to develop their own laws, their own rhythms and their own inner forms of movement.

Thus, if the human organism wishes to use these substances for its own purposes it must first destroy their rhythmic life, as it were, that vital activity which is peculiarly their own. It must do away with these, not merely working over some indifferent material, but working in opposition to certain laws characteristic of these substances. That these substances do have their own laws can soon be felt by the human being when, for instance, a strong poison is conveyed through the digestive canal. He soon feels, in such a case, that the particular law belonging to this substance has mastered him, that these laws now assert themselves. Just as every poison has in general its own inner laws by means of which it carries out an attack on our organism, so it is with every substance, with all the nutriment that we take in. It is not something neutral, but rather it asserts itself in accordance with its own nature, its own quality of being. It has, we may say, its own rhythm. This rhythm must be combated by the human being, so that it is not only a case of working over neutral building material within man's inner organisation, but rather that the peculiar nature of this building material must first be mastered.

We may say, therefore, that in those organs which our food first encounters inside the human being we have the instruments with which to oppose in the first place, what constitutes the peculiar life of the nutritive substance “life” here to be conceived in its wider meaning, so that even the apparently lifeless world of nature, with its laws of movement, is included. That which the food has within it as its own rhythm, which contradicts the human rhythm, must be modified. And in this work of change the organism of the spleen is, so to speak, the outpost. In this changing of the rhythm, however, in this work of re-forming and of defending, the other organs we have mentioned also participate; so that in the spleen, the gall-bladder, and the liver we have a co-operating system of organs whose main function it is, when food is received into the organism, to repel what constitutes the particular inner nature of this food. All the activity first developed in the stomach, or even before the food reaches it, and everything which is then brought about by the secretions² of the gall, and which takes place further through the activity of the liver and the spleen, all of this results in that warding off we have mentioned of the peculiar nature of the nutritive substances.

Thus our food is adapted, we may say, to the inner rhythm of the human organism only when it has been met by the counter-activity of these organs. Only, therefore, when we have taken in our nutriment, and have exposed it to the activity of these organs, do we have in us something capable of being received into that organic system which is the bearer, the instrument, of our ego. Before any sort of external nutritive substance can be received into this blood of ours, so that the blood shall become capable of serving as the instrument of our ego, all those forms of law peculiar to the external world must be set aside, and the blood must receive the nutriment in such form as corresponds to the particular nature of the human organism. We may say, therefore, that in the spleen, the liver and the gall-bladder as they are in themselves and as they react upon the stomach, we have those organs which adapt the laws of the outside world, from which we take our food, to the inner organisation, the inner rhythm, of man.

This human nature, however, in all its working as a totality and with all its members, confronts not only the inner world; it must also be in a continual correspondence or intercourse with the outside world, in a continual living reciprocal activity in relation to that world. This living interaction with the world outside is cut off by the fact that, in so far as we come into connection with it through our nutritive material, the three organ-systems of the liver, the gall-bladder, and the spleen are placed in opposition to the laws of that world. From this side, through these organs, conformity to external law is eliminated. If the human organism were exposed only to these systems of organs it would shut itself off completely, so to speak, from the outside world, would itself become, as a system of organs, an entity completely isolated in itself. Something else, therefore, is necessary. Just as the human being needs, on the one hand, organ-systems by means of which the outside world is so reshaped as to be in accordance with his inner world, so must he be in a position also, on the other hand, to confront the outside world directly with the help of the instrument of his ego: that is, he must place his organism, which otherwise would remain a kind of entity isolated within itself, in direct continual connection with the outside world.

Whereas the blood enters into connection with the external world from the one direction, only in such a way that it contains that part of this world alone from which all forms of law peculiar to it have been cast aside, from the other side it enters into relation with this external world so that it can in a certain sense come into direct contact with it. This happens when the blood flows through the lungs and comes into contact with the outer air. It is there renewed by means of the oxygen in this outer air, and is brought into such a form that nothing can now weaken it in this form; so that the oxygen of the air thus actually meets the instrument of the human ego in a condition that conforms with its own essential nature and quality of being.

There appears thus before our eyes this truly remarkable fact: that what we may call the noblest instrument possessed by man, his blood, which is the instrument of his ego, stands there as an entity that receives all its nourishment, everything that it takes from the life of the outside world, carefully filtered by the organ-systems we have characterised. In this way the blood is made capable of becoming a complete expression of the inner organisation of man, the inner rhythm of man. On the other hand, however, in so far as the blood comes into direct contact with the outside world, with that particular substance in the external world that may be taken in as it is, in its own inner form of law, its own vital activity, without needing to be directly combated, to that extent is this human organism not something secluded within itself but at the same time in full contact with the world outside.

We have, accordingly, in this blood-organism of man, looked at from this standpoint, something very wonderful. We have in it an actual, genuine means of expression of the human ego, which is in fact turned toward the external world on the one side, and on the other toward its own inner life. Just as man is directed through his nerve-system, as we have seen, toward the impressions of this outer world, taking the outer world into himself; as it were, through the nerves by way of the soul, just so does he come into direct contact with the outer world through the instrument of his blood, in that the blood receives oxygen from the air through the lungs. We may say, therefore, that in the system of the spleen, liver, and gall-bladder, on the one hand, and in the lung-system on the other, we have two systems which counteract each other. Outer world and inner world, so to speak, have an absolutely direct contact with each other in the human organism by means of the blood, because the blood comes into contact on the one side with the outer air and on the other with the nutritive material that has been deprived of its own nature. One might say that the action of two worlds comes into collision within man, like positive and negative electricity. We can very easily picture to ourselves where that organ-system is located which is designed to permit the mutual rebounding of these two systems of cosmic forces to act upon it. Upward as far as the heart there work the transformed nutritive juices, inasmuch as the blood, which carries them, streams through the heart; inward to the heart, inasmuch as the blood flows through it, works the oxygen of the air which enters the blood directly from the outer world. We have in the heart, therefore, that organ in which there meet each other these two systems into which the human being is interwoven and to which he is attached from two different directions. The whole inner organism of man is joined to the heart on the one side, and on the other, this inner organism itself is connected directly through the heart with the rhythm, the inner vital activity, of the outer world.

It is quite possible that when two such systems collide the direct result of their interaction may be a harmony. The system of the great outside world or macrocosm presses upon us through the fact that it sends the oxygen or the air in general into our inner organism, and the system of our small inner world or microcosm transforms our nourishment; therefore we might imagine that these systems, because of the fact that the blood streams through the heart, are able in the blood to create a harmonious balance. If this were so, the human being would be yoked to two worlds, so to speak, providing him with his inner equilibrium. Now, we shall see later in the course of these lectures, that the connection between the world and the human being is not such that the world leaves us quite passive—that it sends its forces into us in two different ways, while we are simply harnessed to their counteracting influences. No, it is not like that; but rather, as we shall more and more learn to know, the essential thing with regard to man is the fact that at last a residue always remains for his own inner activity; and that it is left ultimately to man himself to bring about the balance, the inner equilibrium, right into his very organs. We must, therefore, seek within the human organism itself for the balancing of these two world-systems, the harmonising of these two systems of organs. We must realise that the harmonising of these two organ-systems is not already provided through that kind of conformity to law operating outside man and that other kind of conformity to law which works only within his own organism, but that this must be evoked through the help of an organ-system of his own. Man must establish the harmony within himself. (We are not now speaking of the consciousness, but of those processes which take place entirely unconsciously within the organ-systems of the human being.) This balancing of the two systems, the system of spleen, liver, gall-bladder on the one hand and the lung-system on the other, as they confront the blood which flows through the heart is, indeed, brought about. It is brought about through the fact that we have the kidney-system inserted in the entire human organism and in intimate relationship with the circulation of the blood.

In this kidney-system we have that which harmonises, as it were, the outer activities due to the direct contact of the blood with the air and those other activities proceeding from the inner human organism itself in that the food must first be prepared by being deprived of its own nature. In this kidney-system, accordingly, we have a balancing system between the two kinds of organ-systems previously characterised; and the organism is in a position by means of this system to dispose of the excess which otherwise would result from the inharmonious interaction of the two other systems.

Over against the entire inner organisation, the organs belonging to the digestive apparatus (in which we must include the organs we have learned to know as liver, gall-bladder, and spleen), we have placed that system for which these organs primarily develop their preparatory activity, namely, the blood-system. But also over against this blood-system we have placed those organs which work, on the one hand to counteract a one-sided isolation, but on the other hand to create a balance between the inner systems we have mentioned and what presses inward from without. If we think, therefore, of the blood-system with its central point, the heart, as placed in the middle of the organism—and we shall see how truly justifiable this is—we have adjoining this system of blood and heart, on the one side the spleen, liver, and gall-bladder systems, and connected with it on the other side the lung and kidney systems. We shall emphasise later on how extremely close this connection is between the lung-system and the kidney-system. If we sketch the systems side by side we have in them everything belonging to the inner organisation of man which is related in a special way, and which so presents itself to us in this relationship that we are obliged to look upon the heart, together with the blood-system belonging to it, as by far the most important part. Now, I have already pointed out, and we shall see even more definitely to what an extent such a giving of names as we have described is justified, that in occultism the activity of the spleen is characterised as a Saturn-activity, that of the liver as a Jupiter-activity, and that of the gall-bladder as a Mars-activity. On the same basis on which these names were chosen for the activities here referred to, occult knowledge sees in the heart and the blood-system belonging to it something in the human organism which merits the name Sun, just as the sun outside merits this name in the planetary system. In the lung-system, there is contained what the occultists, according to the same principle, characterise as Mercury, and in the kidney-system that which merits the name Venus. Thus, by means of these names, we have pointed out in these systems of the human organism, even if at the present moment we do not in the least undertake a justification of the names, something like an inner world system. We have, moreover, supplemented this inner world system in that we have placed ourselves in a position to observe the relationship which manifests itself in the very nature of man as holding good for the two other organ-systems having a certain special connection with the blood-system. Only when we observe these things in such a way do we present something complete in respect to what we may call the real inner human world. In the following lectures I shall have occasion to show you that the occultists have actual reasons for conceiving the relationship of the sun to Mercury and Venus as being similar to that which we must necessarily think of as existing between the heart and lungs and kidneys respectively, within the human organism.

We see, therefore, that in the instrument of our ego, our blood-system, expressing its rhythm in the heart, something is present that is determined to a certain extent in its entire formation, its inner nature and quality of being, by man's inner world system; something that must first be embedded in the inner world system of the human being before it can live as it actually does live. We have in this human blood-system, as I have often stated, the physical instrument of our ego. Indeed, we know that our ego as constituted is only possible by reason of the fact that it is built up on the foundation of a physical body, an ether-body, and an astral body. An ego free to fly about in the world by itself, as a human ego, is unthinkable. A human ego within this world, which is the world that for the moment concerns us, presupposes as its basis an astral body, an ether-body, and a physical body.

Now, just as this ego in its spiritual connection pre-supposes the three members of man's being we have just named, so does its physical organ, the blood-system, which is the instrument of the ego, presuppose likewise on the physical side corresponding images, as it were, of the astral body and the ether-body. Thus the blood-system can carry out its evolution only on the basis of something else. Whereas the plant simply evolves out of inanimate and inorganic nature, in that it grows directly out of this, we must say that in the case of the human blood-organism the mere outer world cannot serve as a basis in the way that it serves the plant, but this outer world must first be transformed by way of our nutrition. And just as the physical body of man must bear within itself the ether-body and the astral body, so what streams in with the food must first be transformed before that which is the instrument of the human ego can merge itself with these transformed nutritive substances.

Even though we may say that the nature of this physical organ, this physical instrument of the human ego, is determined in the lung-system by the outer world, it is nevertheless so determined by the outer world that it is, after all, an organ of the human bodily organisation. Here again we must differentiate between what comes to man from outside in the form of air (is breathed in and enables him to permeate his blood directly with the rhythm belonging to the outer world) and what approaches the blood, the living instrument of the ego in the organism, not directly, but, as has already been described, by the roundabout path of the soul: everything, namely, that man takes in by receiving the impressions of the outer world through the senses, so that the senses then convey these impressions to the tablet of the blood.

We may, therefore, state it thus: Not only does man come by means of the air into direct physical contact with the outside world, in that this contact works right into his blood; but by means of the sense organs he also comes into contact with the outside world in such a way that this contact is a non-physical one, taking place through the process of perception which the soul unfolds when it comes into relation with its environment.

We here have something like a higher process in addition to the process of breathing, something like a spiritualised breathing process. Whereas through the breathing process we take the outer world in the form of matter into our organism, we take, through the process of perception, by which I mean here everything that we work over inwardly in connection with the external impressions we receive, something into our organism which is a spiritualised process of breathing. And there now arises the question: “How do these two processes work together?” For in the human organism everything must have a reciprocal, a counterbalancing activity. Let us for a moment put this question still more exactly, for certain essential things will depend upon an accurate presentation.

In order to be able to convey to our minds the answer which we shall give to-day hypothetically, we must first understand clearly how an interaction, a reciprocal activity, can take place between all that works through the blood, all that the blood has changed into through the fact that the different processes have come about under the influence of the inner world system, and what we carry on as processes of external perception. For, in spite of the fact that the blood is thus filtered, and even though so much care has been taken to make it the wonderfully organised substance it is, so that it can be the instrument of our ego, in spite of this it is nevertheless primarily a physical substance in the human organism, and belongs as such to the physical body. At first, therefore, there seems to be a very great difference between this human blood, which has been prepared as it has, and what we know as our processes of perception, everything, that is, which the soul performs. Indeed, this is an undeniable reality, for anyone would have to be remarkably lacking in ability to think, who would deny that perceptions, concepts, feelings, and will-impulses exist just the same as does a blood-substance, a nerve-substance, a liver-substance, a gall-substance. As to how these things are connected world-conceptions might begin to conflict. They might dispute, let us say, as to whether thoughts are merely some sort of activity of the nerve-substance, or something of that sort. It is only at this point that the conflict can begin between the different world-conceptions. No world-conception can dispute over the obvious fact that our inner soul-life, our thought-life, our feeling-life, everything which builds itself up on the foundation of external perceptions and impressions, presents a reality in itself. Note well that I did not say, in the first place, “an absolutely isolated reality,” but “a reality in itself,” for nothing in the world is isolated. The words “reality in itself” are intended to indicate what may be observed as being real within our inner world system; and to this last belong all our thoughts, feelings and so forth, quite as truly as do the stomach, the liver, and the gall-bladder.

Yet something else may strike us when we see these two realities side by side—everything on the one hand which, even though so thoroughly filtered, is none the less physical, namely, the blood; and on the other hand that which at first appears, indeed, to have nothing at all to do with anything physical, namely, the content of the soul-life, consisting of feelings, thoughts and so forth. As a matter of fact this very aspect of these two kinds of reality presents man with such difficulties that the most varied answers, offered by the most diverse world-conceptions, have come to be associated with it.

There are world-conceptions, for instance, that believe in a direct influence upon physical substance of everything connected with the soul, with thought and with feeling, as if thought could work directly upon physical substance. In contrast to these, there are others which assume that thoughts, feelings, and so forth, are simply the products of the processes that take place in physical substance. The dispute between these two world-conceptions has through long periods of time played an important role in the outside world, but not in the field of occultism, in which it is considered a dispute over empty words.

Since no ultimate agreement was reached, there has appeared during more recent times still another conception bearing the strange name of “psychologic-physical parallelism.” If I were to express it rather trivially I might say that since the disputants had no longer any other resource, not knowing whether spirit works upon the processes of the physical body or whether these bodily processes influence the spirit, they concluded that there are two processes running parallel courses. They argued: at the same time that man thinks, feels and so forth, certain definite parallel processes are taking place in his physical organism. The perception, “I see red,” would according to this correspond to some sort of material process. But they do not go any further than to say that it “corresponds.” Indeed, this is a mere expedient which leads them out of all their difficulties, but only in the sense that it sets these aside, not that it overcomes them. All the disputes that have arisen on this basis, including the futility of the psychologic-physical parallelism, result from the fact that people insist upon deciding these questions on a basis upon which they simply cannot be decided. We have to do with non-material processes when we consider the activities of our soul-life as inner life; and we have to do with material processes when we centre our attention upon the blood, the most highly organised thing in us. If we simply compare these two things, physical activities and soul-activities, and then seek by means of reflection to find out how each of them works upon the other, we shall not arrive anywhere. Through reflection one may find all sorts of arbitrary solutions or non-solutions. The only way to determine anything in regard to these questions is actually to establish a higher knowledge. This does not limit itself either to viewing the outer world with the physical senses or to thought that is bound up with a merely physical external world, but elevates itself to a certain extent to what leads beyond the physical, and likewise to that which leads into the super-physical world from our own inner soul-life which indeed we experience in the physical world. We must ascend, on the one hand, from the material to the super-sensible, the super-material. On the other hand, we must ascend also from our soul-life to the super-physical, that is, to that which lies at the basis of our soul-life in the superphysical world; for our soul-life, with all its feelings, etc., is, of course, something that we experience in the physical world. We must, accordingly, ascend from both sides to a super-physical world.

Now, in order to ascend from the material side to the super-physical world, those soul-exercises are necessary which enable man to look behind the external, the sensible, behind that veil, of which I spoke yesterday, into which are woven our sense-impressions. Moreover, such sense-impressions as these we also have before us, of course, when we observe the whole external organism of man. And when we descend to the very finest element of the human organism, to the blood, we are, nevertheless, dealing with a merely physical-sensible thing when we observe it, at first, with the physical senses, or at least with the instruments and methods of external science, which give us just such a picture of the blood as would an external eye if it could see this blood directly.

We have said, then, that with the help of such soul-exercises as lead up into the super-sensible world, we can penetrate into the foundations of the physical world, into the super-sensible element in the human organism. In doing this, the first super-sensible thing we meet in this human organism is what we call the ether-body. This ether-body (and we shall describe it still more accurately from the standpoint of occult physiology) is a super-sensible organisation, which we first think of simply as the super-sensible basic substance out of which the sensible or physical organism of man is constructed, and of which it is a copy. Of course the blood is also an impress or copy of this ether-body. Thus we have already at this point, by coming only one stage beyond the sense-organism, something super-sensible in the human ether-body, and the question now arises: are we able to approach this super-sensible also from the other side, from the side of the soul-life, from what we experience in the sensations, thoughts and feelings that we build up on the basis of our impressions of the outside world?

We have already seen that we cannot approach the physical organism directly, for the physical and material place themselves in our way. Can we approach the ether-organism? It is clear that we cannot approach it as directly as we can our soul-life. When we are at work in our soul what at first happens is that we receive external impressions. The outside world acts upon our senses, and we then work over the external impressions in our soul. But we do more than that, we store up, so to speak, these impressions which we have received. Just think for a moment about the simple phenomenon of memory, when you recall something that you experienced, perhaps years ago. At that time, on the basis of external perceptions, certain impressions took form, which you then worked over, and which you draw up to-day out of the depths of your soul, and to-day there comes to you the memory, it may be something quite simple: the memory of a tree, let us say, or an odour. Here you have stored up something in your soul which could remain yours from the external impression and the elaboration of it in your soul, something that can form in you the recollection.

We now find, however, through observation of the soul-life attained through exercises of the soul, that in the moment when we have developed our soul-life far enough to be able to store up mental pictures in the memory we are not working with our soul experiences only in our ego. We first confront the outside world with our ego, take impressions from it into our ego, and work these over in our astral body. But, were we to work them over only in the astral body, we should straightway forget them. When we draw conclusions we are at work in our astral bodies; but when we fix impressions within us so firmly that, after some little time has passed, or indeed after only a few minutes, we can again recall them, we have stamped upon our ether-body these impressions received through our ego and worked over in our astral body. In these memory-pictures, accordingly, we have drawn out of our ego down into our ether-body that which we have lived over inwardly as activity of soul in our contact with the outer world. Now, if we have something which impresses upon the ether-body our memory-pictures taken, as it were, from the soul, and if from the other side we recognise the ether-body as that super-sensible expression of our organism which is nearest to the physical, the question then arises: How does this impressing come about? In other words, when the human being works over external impressions, makes them into memory-pictures, and in doing so thrusts them into his ether-body, how does it happen that he does actually bring down into the ether-body what the astral body has first worked over and what now presses against the ether-body? How does he transfer it?

This transfer takes place in a very remarkable way. If we observe the blood—let us now imagine ourselves within the human ether-body—quite schematically as it courses through the heart, and think of it as the external physical expression of the human ego, we thereby see how this ego works, how it receives impressions corresponding with the outer world and condenses these to memory-pictures. We see, furthermore, not only that our blood is active in this process, but also that, throughout its course, especially in the upward direction, somewhat less in the downward, it stirs up the ether-body, so that we see currents developing everywhere in the ether-body, taking a very definite course, as if they would join the blood flowing upward from the heart and go up to the head. And in the head these currents come together, in about the same way, to use a comparison belonging to the external world, as do currents of electricity when they rush toward a point which is opposed by another point, so as to neutralise the positive and the negative. When we observe with a soul trained in occult methods, we see at this point ether-forces compressed as if under a very powerful tension, those ether-forces which are called forth through the impressions that now desire to become definite concepts, memory-pictures, and to stamp themselves upon the ether-body.

I shall, therefore, draw here the last out-streamings of these ether-currents, as they flow up toward, the brain, and show their crowding together somewhat as this would actually appear. We see here a very powerful tension which concentrates at one point, and announces: “I will now enter into the ether-body!” just as when positive and negative electricity are impelled to neutralise each other. We then see how, in opposition to these, other currents flow from that portion of the ether-body which belongs to the rest of the bodily organisation. These currents go out for the most part from the lower part of the breast, but also from the lymph vessels and other organs, and come together in such a way that they oppose these other currents. Thus we have in the brain, whenever a memory-picture wishes to form itself, two ether-currents, one coming from below and one from above, which oppose each other under the greatest possible tension, just as two electric currents oppose each other. If a balance is brought about between these two currents, then a concept has become a memory-picture and has incorporated itself in the ether-body.

Such super-sensible currents in the human organism always express themselves by creating for themselves also a physical sense-organ, which we must first look upon as a sense-manifestation. Thus we have within us an organ, situated in the centre of the brain, which is the physical sense-expression for that which wishes to take the form of a memory-picture; and opposite to this is situated still another organ in the brain. These two organs in the human brain are the physical-sensible expression of the two currents in the human ether-body; they are, one might say, something like the ultimate indication of the fact that there are such currents in the ether-body. These currents condense themselves with such force that they seize the human bodily substance and consolidate it into these organs. We thus actually get an impression of bright etheric light-currents streaming across from the one to the other of these organs, and pouring themselves out over the human ether-body. These organs are actually present in the human organism. One of them is the pineal gland; the other, the so-called pituitary body: the “epiphysis” and the “hypophysis” respectively. We have here, at a definite point in the human physical organism, the external physical expression of the co-operation of soul and body!

This is what I wished in the first place to give you by way of general principles. With this we conclude to-day's lecture, and tomorrow we will continue our discussion further and find yet more to add to it. It is always important to hold firmly and clearly to the thought that we can always investigate the super-sensible, and can ask ourselves whether the physical expression of the super-sensible world that we should expect to find is actually present. We see. here that these sense-expressions of the super-sensible actually do exist. Since we have here, however, a question of an entrance gate from the sense-world to the super-sensible, you will understand that these two organs are in the highest degree puzzling to physical science, and you will, therefore, be able to get from external science only inadequate information with regard to them.

• 1. How May Theosophy be Refuted? delivered 19th March, 1911. Not published in English.
• 2. For a fuller explanation of the terms translated in these Lectures as secretion and excretion. see note on p. 79.