Consciousness, World Thoughts, and Spiritual Knowledge Recovery

GA 162 — 24 May 1915, Dornach

Second Lecture

Let us first try to bring to mind something that has often been considered in this or that context: that is the relationship of our thoughts, our ideas, to the world. How can we imagine the relationship of our thoughts to the world?

Let us imagine the world as an outer circle and ourselves in relation to it (see diagram on p. 30). At first, it will be clear to us all that we form a picture of the world in our thoughts. We spoke yesterday about how we arrive at conscious thoughts in the physical world. We want to use this circle (small inner circle) to represent what is present in our physical interior through our soul as our thoughts. And I want to say: this circle is intended to represent what we, as the content of our soul with the help of our body, perceive as our thoughts about the world.

Now we know from the various considerations that what we call thoughts actually rest in us on a certain reflection. I have often used the comparison that we are actually also awake outside our physical body, and that the physical body reflects what comes to our consciousness like a mirror. So when we think of ourselves as spiritual beings, we must not actually think of ourselves as being inside there, where – to put it bluntly – our thoughts emerge through our body, but we must think of ourselves as being outside our physical body even when we are awake. So that we actually have to think ourselves into the world with our spiritual-soul nature.

And what is actually mirrored? Well, when thoughts arise in us, something is mirrored in the universe. Let that which lives in the universe and is mirrored in us be indicated by this circle (green). Just as I have the yellow circle here in the human organism as a reflection of something in the universe, I want to indicate something that is mirrored in our thoughts by this green circle in the world itself. And we can say: That which is designated here by this green circle is actually the real thing, the reality, of which our thoughts are only the image, the image reflected back from our body. All this is meant, of course, only schematically.

If we understand in the right sense what actually happens when we confront the world, then we must say that something is generated in us: the whole sum of our ideas is generated in us as a mere image of something that is outside in the world. All that is in our intelligence is an image of something that is outside in the world.

Those who have always known something of the true state of such things in the world have therefore spoken of the truth of the human thought content being spread out in the universe as world thoughts, and that what we have as thought content is just an image of world thoughts. The thoughts of the world are mirrored in us. If our true being were only in our thoughts, then this true being of ours would, of course, be only an image. But from the whole context, it must be clear to us that our true being is not in our head, but that our true being is in the world within us, that we only mirror ourselves in the world thoughts within us. And what we can find in us through the mirroring apparatus of our body is an image of our true reality. All this has already been emphasized in various contexts.

When the physical body dissolves in death, the images that arise in us naturally dissolve as well. What remains of us, our true reality, is basically inscribed in the cosmos throughout our entire life, and it only projects a mirror image of ourselves through our body during our lifetime. Here, you see, lies the difficulty that philosophers continually encounter and cannot overcome with their philosophy, the main difficulty. These philosophers are given, in the first instance, nothing but that which they imagine. But consider that existence is precisely pressed out of the imagination, out of the content of consciousness. It cannot be in it, because what is in consciousness is only a mirror image. Existence cannot be in it. Now philosophers seek existence through consciousness, through ordinary physical consciousness. They cannot find it that way. And it is quite natural that such philosophies had to arise as the Kantian one, for example, which seeks being through consciousness. But because consciousness, quite naturally, can only contain images of being, one can come to no other conclusion than to recognize that one can never approach being with consciousness.

Those who look more deeply then know that of all that is present in consciousness, out there in the world is the true, the real, which is only reflected in consciousness. But what actually happens between the world and consciousness? As a spiritual scientist, one must understand what happens there. Certainly, it is only images that are created by the physical body. The physical body is created out of the universe. It develops during the course of life between birth and death to the point where it can create images, indeed it creates an image of the whole human being that we always encounter when we see ourselves in the mirror of our body. It is only an image, but it is an image. And what is the purpose of this image in the overall cosmic context? Yes, this image must come into being. You see, at the moment when we enter into existence through birth from the spiritual world, an epoch of our existence has actually come to an end in a certain sense. We have entered the spiritual world through a previous death, we carry certain forces into the spiritual world, we live out these forces until what in the fourth mystery drama has been called the midnight hour of existence between 'death and a new birth.

In the second half of life, between death and a new birth, we then gather strength. But where do these forces that we gather want to go? They want to build the new physical body, and when the new physical body is there, the forces that we partake of in the second half between death and a new birth have fulfilled their task. Because they want to represent this new body. They want to come together in the new body. One can say that entire hierarchies are working, struggling, to enable this person to enter into existence through birth from the spiritual universe, as I indicated in the second mystery drama through the words of Capesius. There we see what it evokes in the human mind when man becomes aware of what it means that entire hierarchies of gods are involved in bringing man into the world.

But I would like to say that with these powers, in that they bring about the human being, something very similar happens as it does with the old seeds of a plant: when the new plant has emerged, the old seed has fulfilled its task; it no longer claims to produce a plant. This plant is called upon by the cosmos to produce another seed. Otherwise there would be no further development, and plant life would have had to come to an end with this plant. Thus, if the pictorial consciousness did not arise here, human life would have to end with the renewal of life between birth and death. That which appears as the image of the world is the new germ that now goes through death and, through death, passes over into a new life. And this germ is now really such that it brings over nothing of the old reality, but that it begins at the stage of an image, at nothing, really begins in relation to reality, to outer reality, at nothing.

Please summarize a thought here that is of tremendous importance. Imagine for a moment that you are facing the world. Well, the world is there, you are there too. But you have emerged from the world, the world has created you, you belong to the world. Now life must go on. In that which is in you as reality, which the world has placed in you - this world that you look at within the physical plane - there is nothing that can continue life. But something is added: you look at the world, create an image for yourself, and this image gains the power to carry your existence into further infinite distances. This image becomes the germ of the future.

If you do not consider this, you will never understand that, alongside the sentence “Out of nothing, nothing comes into being,” the other sentence is also fully correct: “In the deepest sense, existence is always generated out of nothing.” Both sentences are fully correct; you just have to apply them in the right place. The continuity of existence does not end with this. If you, let us say, were to wake up in the morning and find that physically nothing at all of you had remained – this is indeed the case when one is approaching a new birth – but only had a full memory of what had happened, thus only the image, you would be quite content. Of course, deeper minds have always felt such things. When Goethe placed the two poems next to each other: “No being can disintegrate into nothingness,” and immediately before it was the poem that means: “Everything must disintegrate into nothingness if it wants to persist in being.” These two poems stand very close to each other in Goethe as an apparent contradiction, immediately one after the other.

But for ordinary philosophy, there is a pitfall here, because it must actually rise to the negation of being.

Now one could again raise the question: What is actually reflected here, if all that is reflected here are only the thoughts of the world? How can one then be certain that there is a reality out there in the world? And here we come to the necessity of recognizing that reality cannot be guaranteed at all through ordinary human consciousness, but that reality can only be guaranteed through that consciousness which arises in us in the regions where the imaginations are, and we get behind the character of the imaginations. Then we find that out there in the world, behind what I have indicated as green, there are not just world thoughts, but that these world thoughts are the expressions of the world beings. But they are veiled by the world thoughts, just as the human inner being is veiled by the content of consciousness. So we look into the world; we think we have the world in our consciousness: there we have nothing, a mere mirror image. That which is mirrored is itself only world thoughts. But these world thoughts belong to real, actual entities, the entities that we know as spiritual-soul entities, as group souls of the lower realms, as human souls, as souls of the higher hierarchies, and so on.

Now you know that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity on Earth falls into two halves. In the older times, there was a kind of dream-like clairvoyance. Through this dream-like clairvoyance, people knew that behind this world, which is ultimately grasped by people in their thoughts, there is a world of real spiritual entities. For in the old dream-like clairvoyance, people did not perceive mere thoughts, just as the newer clairvoyant, who, for example, through the methods of “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” again enters into a relationship with the spiritual world, does not perceive mere thoughts either, but beings of the spiritual world. I have often tried to make this clear, so that I even said in one of the Munich lectures: You put your head into beings the way you would put your head into an anthill: thoughts begin to take on beings and come to life. That was how it was with people in the older days. In their perceiving consciousness, they not only lived in thoughts, but they lived in the beings of the world. But it was necessary - and we know from the various lectures that have been given why it was necessary - that this old clairvoyance, so to speak, dimmed and ceased. For that through which man received his present consciousness, which he needs in order to attain true inner freedom, presupposed that the old clairvoyance slowly dimmed and disappeared. There had to come a time when man was, as it were, dependent on what he, without any clairvoyance, can perceive in the world. He was then naturally cut off, completely cut off from the spiritual world, to put it in extreme terms.

Of course there were always individual spirits who could see into the spiritual world. But while the old clairvoyance was the general, the being cut off from clairvoyance now became, so to speak, the external culture of humanity for a period of time. And we, in turn, are seeking to imprint the consciously attained clairvoyance of this human culture again through our spiritual scientific endeavors. So that we can say: There are two developmental periods of humanity on earth, separated by an intermediate epoch. The first is a period in which dream-like clairvoyance prevailed: people knew that they were connected to a spiritual world, they knew that not only thoughts haunt the universe, but that there are world beings behind the thoughts, beings like ourselves who think these world thoughts. Then a time will come when people will know this again, but through self-achieved clairvoyance. And in between lies the episode where people are cut off. If we take a really close look at what has been said, we have to say that we actually have to expect that at some point in the development of humanity, people will realize that Yes, it makes no sense at all to think that there are thoughts in there in this brain. Because if there were only these thoughts, these images in there, and they did not represent anything, then it would be best to stop all thinking! Because why should one think about a world if this world contains no thoughts in itself?

Of course, in the 19th century people were quite content with the world containing no thoughts, and yet they reflected on the world. But the 19th century simply spread thoughtlessness over the most intimate matters of life. It had the task of bringing this thoughtlessness. But we may still assume that at some point someone may have thought of it in the following way, saying to himself: It only makes sense if we assume that thoughts are not only in there in the brain, but that the whole world is full of thoughts. - If he had now been able to advance to our spiritual science, yes, then he would have said: “Of course, there are thoughts out there in the universe, but there are also beings that harbor these thoughts, just as we harbor our thoughts. They are the beings of the higher hierarchies.

But this time had to come first, so to speak, after humanity had made the deep fall into materialism, that is, into the belief that the world has no thoughts.

One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world. That cannot be what is called Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be, when the tragic moment has come to say: there are thoughts in the world outside, and these thoughts are the real reality, the true, real reality... And where would the time be that had progressed so far that it had drawn the veil over everything spiritual, so to speak, and at the same time said to itself: Thoughts are the real thing in the world, and behind these thoughts there can be no spiritual beings anymore? One did not need to say it out loud, one only needed to feel it unconsciously, so to speak, then one stood there in the world and said to oneself: Yes, there is actually nothing to it with individual life! Individual life has, after all, only a value between birth and death. For that which really lives is not the thoughts of man, but the thoughts of the world, a world intelligence, but a world intelligence without essence. And I believe one could not imagine a greater tragedy than if, say, a Catholic priest had come to this inner realization, so to speak!

What happens happens out of world necessity. Let us assume that a Catholic priest had come to this conclusion... He could easily have done so, because scholasticism has wonderfully trained the mind, and only if one has thoughtless, untrained thinking can one believe that thoughts are only in the head and not outside in the world. Then, so to speak, this Catholic priest would have undermined himself. For by only acknowledging the world thoughts as eternal, he would have wiped out the whole world, which was prescribed for him to believe through revelation as a spiritual world.

It can truly be said: Whatever can be presupposed through spiritual science also happens in the world. If we have the necessity somewhere to presuppose something as necessary and we have to say: a moment must once have existed in the world when something like this was felt, then that moment must have existed, most certainly. And even if it has passed by completely unnoticed, it has been there.

I would like to point out this moment, this moment when one can see how something that is not yet there, but wants to prepare, wants recognition, recognition of world thoughts, but does not yet want to know about what is behind these world thoughts as the world of the higher hierarchies, comes into a conflict.

In 1769, a pamphlet entitled “Lettres sur l'esprit du siècle” was published in London. It contained allusions to such a mood as I have characterized. And in 1770, another pamphlet appeared in Brussels entitled “Système de la nature. The voice of reason in the age and particularly against that of the other system of nature.” This ‘Autre système de la nature’ was that of Baron Holbach, against which this brochure is directed. This brochure said it wanted to take a stand against what Baron Holbach, as a materialist, advocated in his System of Nature. But the two brochures were hardly read, completely forgotten.

But now the strange thing turned out, that in 1865 a beautiful book appeared in Poitiers, by Professor Beaussire, entitled “Antécédents de Hégélianisme dans la philosophie Française”. This book, which appeared in 1865, was a two-volume work and had been written somewhat earlier than the two brochures mentioned, i.e. around 1760-1770, by the Benedictine monk Leodegar Maria Deschamps, who was born in Rennes in 1733 and died in 1774 as prior of a Benedictine monastery in Poitou. The first volume contained what Deschamps called at the time: “Le vrai système.” It was not published until 1865, together with parts of the second volume. It had been in manuscript form in the Poitiers library for so long. Nobody had paid any attention to it, except during the period in which it was written. What Deschamps – for the two pamphlets I mentioned also originated from him – wanted to express in 1769 and 1770 is now expressed in a strong first volume, which was published a century later by Professor Beaussire. That is what it contains. And the second volume contained a detailed correspondence and a presentation of all the efforts that Deschamps made at the time – let us put ourselves in the time when this was: namely before the outbreak of the French Revolution – described all the efforts that Deschamps made to somehow bring about the breakthrough of his “vrai système”. We learn there that the man really, I would say, stood between two fires: On the one hand, wherever his “vrai système” was discussed, he was warned that if the church found out about the “système”, he would be unconditionally subject to the harshest of punishments as a priest. On the other hand, even the so-called freethinkers showed very little interest in his writing. They were interested, but they did not want to do even the smallest thing that he asked: find a publisher. Rousseau, Robinet, Voltaire, the subtle Abbé Yvon, Barthélemy, even Diderot, they all knew this “vrai système”. It was even read to Diderot in his salon. He did not understand it immediately and therefore wanted to keep it to read through; but the good priest Deschamps was so anxious that he took it back because he did not want to put it into other hands. So he was always torn between these two things: on the one hand, he did not want his “vrai système” to be known; on the other hand, he wanted it to really take hold of humanity.

Now let us take a look at what Deschamps presented as his “vrai système” in his first volume. He really did present what I just spoke of, which was bound to come up at some point. He calls that which is in the head (see drawing on p. 40) by designating it as force, “intelligence”; and he calls that which is out there, what I have drawn here in green, “comprehension”. And the significant thing is that he recognized: Yes, if one now conceives this whole mass of thoughts of the world in the spiritual eye, it is a web of world thoughts. If you look at only the individual object, it actually only has meaning when it is placed in the whole fabric of world thoughts. Fundamentally, it is nothing in itself. That which is something, which is there, is the whole fabric of world thoughts.

And that is why Deschamps distinguishes between “le tout” and “tout.” He calls the whole fabric of world thought “le tout,” and he distinguishes “le tout” from “tout.” The first is the sum of all particulars. A subtle distinction, as you can see. “Le tout” is the whole, the universe, the cosmos; ‘tout’ is everything that is considered a detail. But what is considered a detail is at the same time, as he says, ‘rien’; ‘tout’ is ‘rien’; that is an equation. But ‘le tout’, that means in his sense: the universe of thought.

The more materialistically minded minds, like Robinet and his ilk, could not grasp what he actually meant. And so no one could understand him. It could come to pass, because, so to speak, the materialistic tendency was already there, that the works of this Benedictine prior were left to molder. Because, it is not true that in 1865 a professor published the work – after all, that is nothing special. They always did that, you know, they collected and published such old tomes, regardless of their content.

So the time that was to come, the time of materialism, had passed over what had taken hold in the lonely soul, the lonely spirit of a Benedictine prior.

It is probably difficult for today's humanity to learn to delve deeper into the corresponding expressions, which are truly wonderful expressions, namely through the way in which one is placed after the other here : “tout, rien” he calls at the same time, in that he goes further to describe the world, “etre sensible”; and then he forms the expression “neantisme” also “rienisme”, yes even “neantete” and “rienite”. And now consider the relationship between n Second Lecture Let us first try to bring to mind something that has often been considered in this or that context: that is the relationship of our thoughts, our ideas, to the world. How can we imagine the relationship of our thoughts to the world? Let us imagine the world as an outer circle and ourselves in relation to it (see diagram on p. 30). At first, it will be clear to us all that we form a picture of the world in our thoughts. We spoke yesterday about how we arrive at conscious thoughts in the physical world. We want to use this circle (small inner circle) to represent what is present in our physical interior through our soul as our thoughts. And I want to say: this circle is intended to represent what we, as the content of our soul with the help of our body, perceive as our thoughts about the world. Now we know from the various considerations that what we call thoughts actually rest in us on a certain reflection. I have often used the comparison that we are actually also awake outside our physical body, and that the physical body reflects what comes to our consciousness like a mirror. So when we think of ourselves as spiritual beings, we must not actually think of ourselves as being inside there, where – to put it bluntly – our thoughts emerge through our body, but we must think of ourselves as being outside our physical body even when we are awake. So that we actually have to think ourselves into the world with our spiritual-soul nature. And what is actually mirrored? Well, when thoughts arise in us, something is mirrored in the universe. Let that which lives in the universe and is mirrored in us be indicated by this circle (green). Just as I have the yellow circle here in the human organism as a reflection of something in the universe, I want to indicate something that is mirrored in our thoughts by this green circle in the world itself. And we can say: That which is designated here by this green circle is actually the real thing, the reality, of which our thoughts are only the image, the image reflected back from our body. All this is meant, of course, only schematically. If we understand in the right sense what actually happens when we confront the world, then we must say that something is generated in us: the whole sum of our ideas is generated in us as a mere image of something that is outside in the world. All that is in our intelligence is an image of something that is outside in the world. Those who have always known something of the true state of such things in the world have therefore spoken of the truth of the human thought content being spread out in the universe as world thoughts, and that what we have as thought content is just an image of world thoughts. The thoughts of the world are mirrored in us. If our true being were only in our thoughts, then this true being of ours would, of course, be only an image. But from the whole context, it must be clear to us that our true being is not in our head, but that our true being is in the world within us, that we only mirror ourselves in the world thoughts within us. And what we can find in us through the mirroring apparatus of our body is an image of our true reality. All this has already been emphasized in various contexts. When the physical body dissolves in death, the images that arise in us naturally dissolve as well. What remains of us, our true reality, is basically inscribed in the cosmos throughout our entire life, and it only projects a mirror image of ourselves through our body during our lifetime. Here, you see, lies the difficulty that philosophers continually encounter and cannot overcome with their philosophy, the main difficulty. These philosophers are given, in the first instance, nothing but that which they imagine. But consider that existence is precisely pressed out of the imagination, out of the content of consciousness. It cannot be in it, because what is in consciousness is only a mirror image. Existence cannot be in it. Now philosophers seek existence through consciousness, through ordinary physical consciousness. They cannot find it that way. And it is quite natural that such philosophies had to arise as the Kantian one, for example, which seeks being through consciousness. But because consciousness, quite naturally, can only contain images of being, one can come to no other conclusion than to recognize that one can never approach being with consciousness. Those who look more deeply then know that of all that is present in consciousness, out there in the world is the true, the real, which is only reflected in consciousness. But what actually happens between the world and consciousness? As a spiritual scientist, one must understand what happens there. Certainly, it is only images that are created by the physical body. The physical body is created out of the universe. It develops during the course of life between birth and death to the point where it can create images, indeed it creates an image of the whole human being that we always encounter when we see ourselves in the mirror of our body. It is only an image, but it is an image. And what is the purpose of this image in the overall cosmic context? Yes, this image must come into being. You see, at the moment when we enter into existence through birth from the spiritual world, an epoch of our existence has actually come to an end in a certain sense. We have entered the spiritual world through a previous death, we carry certain forces into the spiritual world, we live out these forces until what in the fourth mystery drama has been called the midnight hour of existence between 'death and a new birth. In the second half of life, between death and a new birth, we then gather strength. But where do these forces that we gather want to go? They want to build the new physical body, and when the new physical body is there, the forces that we partake of in the second half between death and a new birth have fulfilled their task. Because they want to represent this new body. They want to come together in the new body. One can say that entire hierarchies are working, struggling, to enable this person to enter into existence through birth from the spiritual universe, as I indicated in the second mystery drama through the words of Capesius. There we see what it evokes in the human mind when man becomes aware of what it means that entire hierarchies of gods are involved in bringing man into the world. But I would like to say that with these powers, in that they bring about the human being, something very similar happens as it does with the old seeds of a plant: when the new plant has emerged, the old seed has fulfilled its task; it no longer claims to produce a plant. This plant is called upon by the cosmos to produce another seed. Otherwise there would be no further development, and plant life would have had to come to an end with this plant. Thus, if the pictorial consciousness did not arise here, human life would have to end with the renewal of life between birth and death. That which appears as the image of the world is the new germ that now goes through death and, through death, passes over into a new life. And this germ is now really such that it brings over nothing of the old reality, but that it begins at the stage of an image, at nothing, really begins in relation to reality, to outer reality, at nothing. Please summarize a thought here that is of tremendous importance. Imagine for a moment that you are facing the world. Well, the world is there, you are there too. But you have emerged from the world, the world has created you, you belong to the world. Now life must go on. In that which is in you as reality, which the world has placed in you - this world that you look at within the physical plane - there is nothing that can continue life. But something is added: you look at the world, create an image for yourself, and this image gains the power to carry your existence into further infinite distances. This image becomes the germ of the future. If you do not consider this, you will never understand that, alongside the sentence “Out of nothing, nothing comes into being,” the other sentence is also fully correct: “In the deepest sense, existence is always generated out of nothing.” Both sentences are fully correct; you just have to apply them in the right place. The continuity of existence does not end with this. If you, let us say, were to wake up in the morning and find that physically nothing at all of you had remained – this is indeed the case when one is approaching a new birth – but only had a full memory of what had happened, thus only the image, you would be quite content. Of course, deeper minds have always felt such things. When Goethe placed the two poems next to each other: “No being can disintegrate into nothingness,” and immediately before it was the poem that means: “Everything must disintegrate into nothingness if it wants to persist in being.” These two poems stand very close to each other in Goethe as an apparent contradiction, immediately one after the other. But for ordinary philosophy, there is a pitfall here, because it must actually rise to the negation of being. Now one could again raise the question: What is actually reflected here, if all that is reflected here are only the thoughts of the world? How can one then be certain that there is a reality out there in the world? And here we come to the necessity of recognizing that reality cannot be guaranteed at all through ordinary human consciousness, but that reality can only be guaranteed through that consciousness which arises in us in the regions where the imaginations are, and we get behind the character of the imaginations. Then we find that out there in the world, behind what I have indicated as green, there are not just world thoughts, but that these world thoughts are the expressions of the world beings. But they are veiled by the world thoughts, just as the human inner being is veiled by the content of consciousness. So we look into the world; we think we have the world in our consciousness: there we have nothing, a mere mirror image. That which is mirrored is itself only world thoughts. But these world thoughts belong to real, actual entities, the entities that we know as spiritual-soul entities, as group souls of the lower realms, as human souls, as souls of the higher hierarchies, and so on. Now you know that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity on Earth falls into two halves. In the older times, there was a kind of dream-like clairvoyance. Through this dream-like clairvoyance, people knew that behind this world, which is ultimately grasped by people in their thoughts, there is a world of real spiritual entities. For in the old dream-like clairvoyance, people did not perceive mere thoughts, just as the newer clairvoyant, who, for example, through the methods of “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” again enters into a relationship with the spiritual world, does not perceive mere thoughts either, but beings of the spiritual world. I have often tried to make this clear, so that I even said in one of the Munich lectures: You put your head into beings the way you would put your head into an anthill: thoughts begin to take on beings and come to life. That was how it was with people in the older days. In their perceiving consciousness, they not only lived in thoughts, but they lived in the beings of the world. But it was necessary - and we know from the various lectures that have been given why it was necessary - that this old clairvoyance, so to speak, dimmed and ceased. For that through which man received his present consciousness, which he needs in order to attain true inner freedom, presupposed that the old clairvoyance slowly dimmed and disappeared. There had to come a time when man was, as it were, dependent on what he, without any clairvoyance, can perceive in the world. He was then naturally cut off, completely cut off from the spiritual world, to put it in extreme terms. Of course there were always individual spirits who could see into the spiritual world. But while the old clairvoyance was the general, the being cut off from clairvoyance now became, so to speak, the external culture of humanity for a period of time. And we, in turn, are seeking to imprint the consciously attained clairvoyance of this human culture again through our spiritual scientific endeavors. So that we can say: There are two developmental periods of humanity on earth, separated by an intermediate epoch. The first is a period in which dream-like clairvoyance prevailed: people knew that they were connected to a spiritual world, they knew that not only thoughts haunt the universe, but that there are world beings behind the thoughts, beings like ourselves who think these world thoughts. Then a time will come when people will know this again, but through self-achieved clairvoyance. And in between lies the episode where people are cut off. If we take a really close look at what has been said, we have to say that we actually have to expect that at some point in the development of humanity, people will realize that Yes, it makes no sense at all to think that there are thoughts in there in this brain. Because if there were only these thoughts, these images in there, and they did not represent anything, then it would be best to stop all thinking! Because why should one think about a world if this world contains no thoughts in itself? Of course, in the 19th century people were quite content with the world containing no thoughts, and yet they reflected on the world. But the 19th century simply spread thoughtlessness over the most intimate matters of life. It had the task of bringing this thoughtlessness. But we may still assume that at some point someone may have thought of it in the following way, saying to himself: It only makes sense if we assume that thoughts are not only in there in the brain, but that the whole world is full of thoughts. - If he had now been able to advance to our spiritual science, yes, then he would have said: “Of course, there are thoughts out there in the universe, but there are also beings that harbor these thoughts, just as we harbor our thoughts. They are the beings of the higher hierarchies. But this time had to come first, so to speak, after humanity had made the deep fall into materialism, that is, into the belief that the world has no thoughts. One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world. That cannot be what is called Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be, when the tragic moment has come to say: there are thoughts in the world outside, and these thoughts are the real reality, the true, real reality... And where would the time be that had progressed so far that it had drawn the veil over everything spiritual, so to speak, and at the same time said to itself: Thoughts are the real thing in the world, and behind these thoughts there can be no spiritual beings anymore? One did not need to say it out loud, one only needed to feel it unconsciously, so to speak, then one stood there in the world and said to oneself: Yes, there is actually nothing to it with individual life! Individual life has, after all, only a value between birth and death. For that which really lives is not the thoughts of man, but the thoughts of the world, a world intelligence, but a world intelligence without essence. And I believe one could not imagine a greater tragedy than if, say, a Catholic priest had come to this inner realization, so to speak! | What happens happens out of world necessity. Let us assume that a Catholic priest had come to this conclusion... He could easily have done so, because scholasticism has wonderfully trained the mind, and only if one has thoughtless, untrained thinking can one believe that thoughts are only in the head and not outside in the world. Then, so to speak, this Catholic priest would have undermined himself. For by only acknowledging the world thoughts as eternal, he would have wiped out the whole world, which was prescribed for him to believe through revelation as a spiritual world. It can truly be said: Whatever can be presupposed through spiritual science also happens in the world. If we have the necessity somewhere to presuppose something as necessary and we have to say: a moment must once have existed in the world when something like this was felt, then that moment must have existed, most certainly. And even if it has passed by completely unnoticed, it has been there. I would like to point out this moment, this moment when one can see how something that is not yet there, but wants to prepare, wants recognition, recognition of world thoughts, but does not yet want to know about what is behind these world thoughts as the world of the higher hierarchies, comes into a conflict. In 1769, a pamphlet entitled “Lettres sur l'esprit du siècle” was published in London. It contained allusions to such a mood as I have characterized. And in 1770, another pamphlet appeared in Brussels entitled “Système de la nature. The voice of reason in the age and particularly against that of the other system of nature.” This ‘Autre système de la nature’ was that of Baron Holbach, against which this brochure is directed. This brochure said it wanted to take a stand against what Baron Holbach, as a materialist, advocated in his System of Nature. But the two brochures were hardly read, completely forgotten. But now the strange thing turned out, that in 1865 a beautiful book appeared in Poitiers, by Professor Beaussire, entitled “Antécédents de Hégélianisme dans la philosophie Française”. This book, which appeared in 1865, was a two-volume work and had been written somewhat earlier than the two brochures mentioned, i.e. around 1760-1770, by the Benedictine monk Leodegar Maria Deschamps, who was born in Rennes in 1733 and died in 1774 as prior of a Benedictine monastery in Poitou. The first volume contained what Deschamps called at the time: “Le vrai système.” It was not published until 1865, together with parts of the second volume. It had been in manuscript form in the Poitiers library for so long. Nobody had paid any attention to it, except during the period in which it was written. What Deschamps – for the two pamphlets I mentioned also originated from him – wanted to express in 1769 and 1770 is now expressed in a strong first volume, which was published a century later by Professor Beaussire. That is what it contains. And the second volume contained a detailed correspondence and a presentation of all the efforts that Deschamps made at the time – let us put ourselves in the time when this was: namely before the outbreak of the French Revolution – described all the efforts that Deschamps made to somehow bring about the breakthrough of his “vrai système”. We learn there that the man really, I would say, stood between two fires: On the one hand, wherever his “vrai système” was discussed, he was warned that if the church found out about the “système”, he would be unconditionally subject to the harshest of punishments as a priest. On the other hand, even the so-called freethinkers showed very little interest in his writing. They were interested, but they did not want to do even the smallest thing that he asked: find a publisher. Rousseau, Robinet, Voltaire, the subtle Abbé Yvon, Barthélemy, even Diderot, they all knew this “vrai système”. It was even read to Diderot in his salon. He did not understand it immediately and therefore wanted to keep it to read through; but the good priest Deschamps was so anxious that he took it back because he did not want to put it into other hands. So he was always torn between these two things: on the one hand, he did not want his “vrai système” to be known; on the other hand, he wanted it to really take hold of humanity. Now let us take a look at what Deschamps presented as his “vrai système” in his first volume. He really did present what I just spoke of, which was bound to come up at some point. He calls that which is in the head (see drawing on p. 40) by designating it as force, “intelligence”; and he calls that which is out there, what I have drawn here in green, “comprehension”. And the significant thing is that he recognized: Yes, if one now conceives this whole mass of thoughts of the world in the spiritual eye, it is a web of world thoughts. If you look at only the individual object, it actually only has meaning when it is placed in the whole fabric of world thoughts. Fundamentally, it is nothing in itself. That which is something, which is there, is the whole fabric of world thoughts. And that is why Deschamps distinguishes between “le tout” and “tout.” He calls the whole fabric of world thought “le tout,” and he distinguishes “le tout” from “tout.” The first is the sum of all particulars. A subtle distinction, as you can see. “Le tout” is the whole, the universe, the cosmos; ‘tout’ is everything that is considered a detail. But what is considered a detail is at the same time, as he says, ‘rien’; ‘tout’ is ‘rien’; that is an equation. But ‘le tout’, that means in his sense: the universe of thought. The more materialistically minded minds, like Robinet and his ilk, could not grasp what he actually meant. And so no one could understand him. It could come to pass, because, so to speak, the materialistic tendency was already there, that the works of this Benedictine prior were left to molder. Because, it is not true that in 1865 a professor published the work – after all, that is nothing special. They always did that, you know, they collected and published such old tomes, regardless of their content. So the time that was to come, the time of materialism, had passed over what had taken hold in the lonely soul, the lonely spirit of a Benedictine prior. It is probably difficult for today's humanity to learn to delve deeper into the corresponding expressions, which are truly wonderful expressions, namely through the way in which one is placed after the other here : “tout, rien” he calls at the same time, in that he goes further to describe the world, “etre sensible”; and then he forms the expression “neantisme” also “rienisme”, yes even “neantete” and “rienite”. And now consider the relationship between n&antisme, rienisme, n&antete, rienite, and what we call Maya, and you will see how closely all these things are related, and how, into the age of material ism, I might say, that which instinctively still remained from the earlier consciousness of looking into a spiritual world, of which the last remnant remained: “le tout,” the cosmic world of thought. Of course, one must also recognize the greatness of such a thinker when he can no longer appeal to us 150 or 160 years later. I am convinced that if, for example, our dear female friends were to obtain these two volumes from some library, and if they were to work their way through the difficult philosophical part of the first half of the first volume and then read the second half of the first volume , they would become quietly furious at the views that Deschamps now develops regarding the position of women, for he has desperately unmodern views on the subject and, in the spirit of Plato, regards women from the point of view of communism. So we must not want to take everything in Deschamps' work at face value. But we must bear in mind what makes him such an interesting personality, especially if we want to consider the progress of the development of humanity. The important thing, however, is that in him we see, as it were, a spiritual view dying out. He is not even read, one could even say not even printed, although the most significant minds of his time knew him. Even a great mind such as Diderot did not even see fit to recommend its publication. All of this has been absorbed by the emerging materialism, As you can see, we must work vigorously and energetically. For it is, after all, a matter of nothing less than bringing a new impulse to the spiritual development of humanity in the face of what, I might say, has emerged so surely and so strongly that, from a certain point in time, it has trampled to death everything that still reminded people of anything other than a more or less materialistically conceived world view. And there was indeed tragedy in this personality of Deschamps. For he was, after all, a Benedictine priest. And the strange thing was this: Baron Holbach said in his “System of Nature”: Religion is the most harmful thing that the human race can have, religion is the greatest fraud, and should be eradicated as quickly as possible -; in contrast to this, Deschamps said: No, “le vrai systeme” must be adopted, and when people adopt “le vrai systeme”, then religion will disappear. But it must be preserved until people have accepted “le vrai systeme”. Then, so to speak, all the revealed truths behind it will be dropped, and in their place will be established the fabric of world thoughts. So this priest, who besides had to teach his boarding school boys the catechism and everything that religion had to offer every day, waited until his “vrai système” would become common property and religion would disappear as a result! There is something highly tragic about this. When we stand today before the outer world, which in many respects believes itself to be beyond materialism, but which is terribly mistaken in this respect, then it is of course primarily a matter of teach people again that what we have as a world of perception within us is a reflection of the truth, and that we are actually always outside of our bodies with our true spiritual-soul nature. I have already discussed this here in another context. I also pointed out at the time that I had presented this from an epistemological, purely philosophical point of view at the last philosophers' congress in Bologna. Unfortunately, however, none of the philosophers at the time understood what was actually meant philosophically. Even the chairman of the congress, the famous philosopher Paul Deußen, is one of them. After my speech, he merely said: Yes, I have heard something about Theosophy. I have read a brochure that Franz Hartmann wrote against Theosophy. That was all Deußen could say about my lecture, Deußen, one of the most well-known and, in the field of Indology, most revered philosophers of the present day. But we must be clear about the fact that it must really be the first step: to make plausible to the world consciousness of humanity this peculiar relationship of the spiritual and soul to the physical. Then the spirit that is at work in the course of human development will bring it about that people will recognize more than could be recognized in the 18th century, that people will see behind the “entendement” » the hierarchies and know that the «entendement» is that which the hierarchies live out as the thought content of the world, just as we live out the intelligence, «intelligence», through our being. But some things will necessarily be connected with this change in the spiritual consciousness of humanity, which we have been talking about now and also in these days in a certain context. For what matters most of all for us – and I must keep emphasizing this – is not just to absorb knowledge, but to connect with every fiber of our spiritual and soul being with the results of spiritual research, so that we learn to think, feel and sense in the spirit of spiritual research. Then, wherever we are in life, wherever karma has placed us, whether we have a more material or a more spiritual occupation, we will truly carry into the individual branches of life that which is spiritually felt, felt and thought in us. | And this must be said: anyone who expects a continuation, a real progress of culture from something other than such a spiritual deepening of humanity will wait in vain if it is left to him. The only thing that will really advance humanity is this spiritual deepening; for the events that otherwise take place can only be brought to a prosperous end if there are as many souls as possible that are able to feel, sense and think spiritually. Spiritual thinking must coincide with what is otherwise happening in the world if there is to be progress in the future of civilization. What must be lived out as the karma of materialism, you are now experiencing when you look around at what is happening in the world. It is the karma of materialism being lived out. And the one who can look into things will find in all details - even in all details - the karma of materialism being lived out. We will only find the way into a prosperous future if we find our way through what, I would like to say, under the leadership of Christ, in the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, arises for the soul's perception, if we orient this perception of the soul to the results of spiritual science. And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this intuitive perception and feeling has not to be drawn from spiritual science, and that everything else in the present world is opposed to it, and that we ourselves oppose spiritual science when we do not find ourselves ready to go, so to speak, completely into its spirit. For only spiritual science deals with the human being as such, with the human being as such, in relation to present-day humanity. Everything in present-day humanity is moving towards the goal of denying the human being as such and presenting something other than the human being as that for which one should fight, for which one should work, and of which one should think. As you know, my dear friends, I have been unable to go into the details of our contemporary phenomena since Christmas for reasons I am sure you can guess. But in general, at least, we must appeal again and again to the intuitive perception of those who want to stand in the realm of spiritual science: the greatest in the newer development contains the germs for what humanity must attain. The greatest thing has been achieved by the fact that, in certain currents of human culture, what can merely be called national culture, what can merely be called national aspiration, has receded. For the true inner impulse is for the national to be overcome by the spiritual in the course of human development. Anything that works towards the unification of world territories from a national point of view works against human progress. Precisely there, in the most beautiful measure, that which leads forward can occasionally develop where a part of a nationality lives, separated from the great mass of the nationality, cut off from an entire massif. How something really significant was achieved by the fact that, in addition to the Germans in the German Empire, there were also Germans in Austria and Germans in Switzerland, separated from the Germans in the German Empire. And it would be contrary not only to the course of what one otherwise thinks, but contrary to the idea of progress, to think that a uniformity under a national idea should unite these three limbs into a single nationality, disregarding precisely the great thing that comes from external political separation. And one cannot imagine how infinitely bitter and sad it is when the national point of view is asserted by certain quarters as the only one for the formation of political contexts, when, from a national point of view, demarcations are sought, separations are sought. One can stand aloof from all politics, but fall into mourning when this idea, which is contrary to all real progressive forces, comes to the fore. A sad Pentecost, my dear friends, when such words are forced from the soul. But let us hold fast to the other Pentecost, to which attention was drawn yesterday and the day before, to that Pentecost to which the third part of our saying refers: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.” Let us hold fast to the awareness that the human soul can find the way into the spiritual worlds, and that in our epoch of development the point has come when it is predetermined in the spiritual world that a new revelation should flow into humanity, a scientific revelation of spiritual knowledge that can take hold of human souls and give them what they need now and for the future. We may say it, my dear friends: when peaceful times come again in place of the present ones, we will be able to speak quite differently – if not some particularly repulsive karma should prevent it – than we have been able to speak on spiritual-scientific ground up to now. But all this presupposes that spiritual science is not just knowledge about us, but a real, a world-wide gift of Pentecost; that we really do not just unite spiritual science with our minds, but with our hearts. For then, through the union of spiritual science with the power of our hearts, what wants to come down from the spiritual world will gather into the fiery tongues that are the tongues of Pentecost. What wants to come down from the spiritual world as the gift of Pentecost lures into the human soul, not the intellect, but the heart, the warm heart that can feel with spiritual science, not just know about spiritual science. And the more your heart is warmed by the abstractions of spiritual science, which sometimes seem to chill, even though we almost always try to present only the concrete, the better. And the more we can even unite such a thought, as was expressed just yesterday, with our hearts, the better! We have said that as materialists we usually perceive only one half of the physical world: what grows, springs up and sprouts. But we must also look at destruction, although we must see that destruction does not impose itself on us as the one who sees destruction as a mere nothingness. In all that is like destruction, we must also see the ascent and rising of the spiritual. We must connect ourselves completely with what we can feel and inwardly experience through the results of spiritual science as the spiritual life, the spiritual. Then we will feel more and more the truth of the saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. We will have a scientific trust that we will be awakened to the spiritual world through the power of the spirit. And we will not feel with pride, but in all humility, what is to be brought into the world through spiritual science, but we will feel it especially in our hard time, in our time, which asks so many questions about our feelings that can only be answered when spiritual science can truly assert itself. I do not wish to stir up anyone's pride, but I would like to repeat a word that was once spoken when there was also much talk about what should happen through minds that had received something and were to carry it out. It was said to these minds - not to stir their pride either, but appealing to their humility -: “You are the salt of the earth.” Let us understand the word for ourselves in the right sense: “You are the salt of the earth.” And let us become aware that precisely when the fruits, the fruits of the blood-soaked earth will be there in the future, these fruits will not flourish without spirituality: that the earth will need salt even more afterwards. Take these words, imbued with heartfelt passion, into your own heart and soul on this Pentecost, when we want to truly imbue our entire being with the truth in the sense suggested: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. antisme, rienisme, n Second Lecture Let us first try to bring to mind something that has often been considered in this or that context: that is the relationship of our thoughts, our ideas, to the world. How can we imagine the relationship of our thoughts to the world? Let us imagine the world as an outer circle and ourselves in relation to it (see diagram on p. 30). At first, it will be clear to us all that we form a picture of the world in our thoughts. We spoke yesterday about how we arrive at conscious thoughts in the physical world. We want to use this circle (small inner circle) to represent what is present in our physical interior through our soul as our thoughts. And I want to say: this circle is intended to represent what we, as the content of our soul with the help of our body, perceive as our thoughts about the world. Now we know from the various considerations that what we call thoughts actually rest in us on a certain reflection. I have often used the comparison that we are actually also awake outside our physical body, and that the physical body reflects what comes to our consciousness like a mirror. So when we think of ourselves as spiritual beings, we must not actually think of ourselves as being inside there, where – to put it bluntly – our thoughts emerge through our body, but we must think of ourselves as being outside our physical body even when we are awake. So that we actually have to think ourselves into the world with our spiritual-soul nature. And what is actually mirrored? Well, when thoughts arise in us, something is mirrored in the universe. Let that which lives in the universe and is mirrored in us be indicated by this circle (green). Just as I have the yellow circle here in the human organism as a reflection of something in the universe, I want to indicate something that is mirrored in our thoughts by this green circle in the world itself. And we can say: That which is designated here by this green circle is actually the real thing, the reality, of which our thoughts are only the image, the image reflected back from our body. All this is meant, of course, only schematically. If we understand in the right sense what actually happens when we confront the world, then we must say that something is generated in us: the whole sum of our ideas is generated in us as a mere image of something that is outside in the world. All that is in our intelligence is an image of something that is outside in the world. Those who have always known something of the true state of such things in the world have therefore spoken of the truth of the human thought content being spread out in the universe as world thoughts, and that what we have as thought content is just an image of world thoughts. The thoughts of the world are mirrored in us. If our true being were only in our thoughts, then this true being of ours would, of course, be only an image. But from the whole context, it must be clear to us that our true being is not in our head, but that our true being is in the world within us, that we only mirror ourselves in the world thoughts within us. And what we can find in us through the mirroring apparatus of our body is an image of our true reality. All this has already been emphasized in various contexts. When the physical body dissolves in death, the images that arise in us naturally dissolve as well. What remains of us, our true reality, is basically inscribed in the cosmos throughout our entire life, and it only projects a mirror image of ourselves through our body during our lifetime. Here, you see, lies the difficulty that philosophers continually encounter and cannot overcome with their philosophy, the main difficulty. These philosophers are given, in the first instance, nothing but that which they imagine. But consider that existence is precisely pressed out of the imagination, out of the content of consciousness. It cannot be in it, because what is in consciousness is only a mirror image. Existence cannot be in it. Now philosophers seek existence through consciousness, through ordinary physical consciousness. They cannot find it that way. And it is quite natural that such philosophies had to arise as the Kantian one, for example, which seeks being through consciousness. But because consciousness, quite naturally, can only contain images of being, one can come to no other conclusion than to recognize that one can never approach being with consciousness. Those who look more deeply then know that of all that is present in consciousness, out there in the world is the true, the real, which is only reflected in consciousness. But what actually happens between the world and consciousness? As a spiritual scientist, one must understand what happens there. Certainly, it is only images that are created by the physical body. The physical body is created out of the universe. It develops during the course of life between birth and death to the point where it can create images, indeed it creates an image of the whole human being that we always encounter when we see ourselves in the mirror of our body. It is only an image, but it is an image. And what is the purpose of this image in the overall cosmic context? Yes, this image must come into being. You see, at the moment when we enter into existence through birth from the spiritual world, an epoch of our existence has actually come to an end in a certain sense. We have entered the spiritual world through a previous death, we carry certain forces into the spiritual world, we live out these forces until what in the fourth mystery drama has been called the midnight hour of existence between 'death and a new birth. In the second half of life, between death and a new birth, we then gather strength. But where do these forces that we gather want to go? They want to build the new physical body, and when the new physical body is there, the forces that we partake of in the second half between death and a new birth have fulfilled their task. Because they want to represent this new body. They want to come together in the new body. One can say that entire hierarchies are working, struggling, to enable this person to enter into existence through birth from the spiritual universe, as I indicated in the second mystery drama through the words of Capesius. There we see what it evokes in the human mind when man becomes aware of what it means that entire hierarchies of gods are involved in bringing man into the world. But I would like to say that with these powers, in that they bring about the human being, something very similar happens as it does with the old seeds of a plant: when the new plant has emerged, the old seed has fulfilled its task; it no longer claims to produce a plant. This plant is called upon by the cosmos to produce another seed. Otherwise there would be no further development, and plant life would have had to come to an end with this plant. Thus, if the pictorial consciousness did not arise here, human life would have to end with the renewal of life between birth and death. That which appears as the image of the world is the new germ that now goes through death and, through death, passes over into a new life. And this germ is now really such that it brings over nothing of the old reality, but that it begins at the stage of an image, at nothing, really begins in relation to reality, to outer reality, at nothing. Please summarize a thought here that is of tremendous importance. Imagine for a moment that you are facing the world. Well, the world is there, you are there too. But you have emerged from the world, the world has created you, you belong to the world. Now life must go on. In that which is in you as reality, which the world has placed in you - this world that you look at within the physical plane - there is nothing that can continue life. But something is added: you look at the world, create an image for yourself, and this image gains the power to carry your existence into further infinite distances. This image becomes the germ of the future. If you do not consider this, you will never understand that, alongside the sentence “Out of nothing, nothing comes into being,” the other sentence is also fully correct: “In the deepest sense, existence is always generated out of nothing.” Both sentences are fully correct; you just have to apply them in the right place. The continuity of existence does not end with this. If you, let us say, were to wake up in the morning and find that physically nothing at all of you had remained – this is indeed the case when one is approaching a new birth – but only had a full memory of what had happened, thus only the image, you would be quite content. Of course, deeper minds have always felt such things. When Goethe placed the two poems next to each other: “No being can disintegrate into nothingness,” and immediately before it was the poem that means: “Everything must disintegrate into nothingness if it wants to persist in being.” These two poems stand very close to each other in Goethe as an apparent contradiction, immediately one after the other. But for ordinary philosophy, there is a pitfall here, because it must actually rise to the negation of being. Now one could again raise the question: What is actually reflected here, if all that is reflected here are only the thoughts of the world? How can one then be certain that there is a reality out there in the world? And here we come to the necessity of recognizing that reality cannot be guaranteed at all through ordinary human consciousness, but that reality can only be guaranteed through that consciousness which arises in us in the regions where the imaginations are, and we get behind the character of the imaginations. Then we find that out there in the world, behind what I have indicated as green, there are not just world thoughts, but that these world thoughts are the expressions of the world beings. But they are veiled by the world thoughts, just as the human inner being is veiled by the content of consciousness. So we look into the world; we think we have the world in our consciousness: there we have nothing, a mere mirror image. That which is mirrored is itself only world thoughts. But these world thoughts belong to real, actual entities, the entities that we know as spiritual-soul entities, as group souls of the lower realms, as human souls, as souls of the higher hierarchies, and so on. Now you know that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity on Earth falls into two halves. In the older times, there was a kind of dream-like clairvoyance. Through this dream-like clairvoyance, people knew that behind this world, which is ultimately grasped by people in their thoughts, there is a world of real spiritual entities. For in the old dream-like clairvoyance, people did not perceive mere thoughts, just as the newer clairvoyant, who, for example, through the methods of “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” again enters into a relationship with the spiritual world, does not perceive mere thoughts either, but beings of the spiritual world. I have often tried to make this clear, so that I even said in one of the Munich lectures: You put your head into beings the way you would put your head into an anthill: thoughts begin to take on beings and come to life. That was how it was with people in the older days. In their perceiving consciousness, they not only lived in thoughts, but they lived in the beings of the world. But it was necessary - and we know from the various lectures that have been given why it was necessary - that this old clairvoyance, so to speak, dimmed and ceased. For that through which man received his present consciousness, which he needs in order to attain true inner freedom, presupposed that the old clairvoyance slowly dimmed and disappeared. There had to come a time when man was, as it were, dependent on what he, without any clairvoyance, can perceive in the world. He was then naturally cut off, completely cut off from the spiritual world, to put it in extreme terms. Of course there were always individual spirits who could see into the spiritual world. But while the old clairvoyance was the general, the being cut off from clairvoyance now became, so to speak, the external culture of humanity for a period of time. And we, in turn, are seeking to imprint the consciously attained clairvoyance of this human culture again through our spiritual scientific endeavors. So that we can say: There are two developmental periods of humanity on earth, separated by an intermediate epoch. The first is a period in which dream-like clairvoyance prevailed: people knew that they were connected to a spiritual world, they knew that not only thoughts haunt the universe, but that there are world beings behind the thoughts, beings like ourselves who think these world thoughts. Then a time will come when people will know this again, but through self-achieved clairvoyance. And in between lies the episode where people are cut off. If we take a really close look at what has been said, we have to say that we actually have to expect that at some point in the development of humanity, people will realize that Yes, it makes no sense at all to think that there are thoughts in there in this brain. Because if there were only these thoughts, these images in there, and they did not represent anything, then it would be best to stop all thinking! Because why should one think about a world if this world contains no thoughts in itself? Of course, in the 19th century people were quite content with the world containing no thoughts, and yet they reflected on the world. But the 19th century simply spread thoughtlessness over the most intimate matters of life. It had the task of bringing this thoughtlessness. But we may still assume that at some point someone may have thought of it in the following way, saying to himself: It only makes sense if we assume that thoughts are not only in there in the brain, but that the whole world is full of thoughts. - If he had now been able to advance to our spiritual science, yes, then he would have said: “Of course, there are thoughts out there in the universe, but there are also beings that harbor these thoughts, just as we harbor our thoughts. They are the beings of the higher hierarchies. But this time had to come first, so to speak, after humanity had made the deep fall into materialism, that is, into the belief that the world has no thoughts. One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world. That cannot be what is called Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be, when the tragic moment has come to say: there are thoughts in the world outside, and these thoughts are the real reality, the true, real reality... And where would the time be that had progressed so far that it had drawn the veil over everything spiritual, so to speak, and at the same time said to itself: Thoughts are the real thing in the world, and behind these thoughts there can be no spiritual beings anymore? One did not need to say it out loud, one only needed to feel it unconsciously, so to speak, then one stood there in the world and said to oneself: Yes, there is actually nothing to it with individual life! Individual life has, after all, only a value between birth and death. For that which really lives is not the thoughts of man, but the thoughts of the world, a world intelligence, but a world intelligence without essence. And I believe one could not imagine a greater tragedy than if, say, a Catholic priest had come to this inner realization, so to speak! | What happens happens out of world necessity. Let us assume that a Catholic priest had come to this conclusion... He could easily have done so, because scholasticism has wonderfully trained the mind, and only if one has thoughtless, untrained thinking can one believe that thoughts are only in the head and not outside in the world. Then, so to speak, this Catholic priest would have undermined himself. For by only acknowledging the world thoughts as eternal, he would have wiped out the whole world, which was prescribed for him to believe through revelation as a spiritual world. It can truly be said: Whatever can be presupposed through spiritual science also happens in the world. If we have the necessity somewhere to presuppose something as necessary and we have to say: a moment must once have existed in the world when something like this was felt, then that moment must have existed, most certainly. And even if it has passed by completely unnoticed, it has been there. I would like to point out this moment, this moment when one can see how something that is not yet there, but wants to prepare, wants recognition, recognition of world thoughts, but does not yet want to know about what is behind these world thoughts as the world of the higher hierarchies, comes into a conflict. In 1769, a pamphlet entitled “Lettres sur l'esprit du siècle” was published in London. It contained allusions to such a mood as I have characterized. And in 1770, another pamphlet appeared in Brussels entitled “Système de la nature. The voice of reason in the age and particularly against that of the other system of nature.” This ‘Autre système de la nature’ was that of Baron Holbach, against which this brochure is directed. This brochure said it wanted to take a stand against what Baron Holbach, as a materialist, advocated in his System of Nature. But the two brochures were hardly read, completely forgotten. But now the strange thing turned out, that in 1865 a beautiful book appeared in Poitiers, by Professor Beaussire, entitled “Antécédents de Hégélianisme dans la philosophie Française”. This book, which appeared in 1865, was a two-volume work and had been written somewhat earlier than the two brochures mentioned, i.e. around 1760-1770, by the Benedictine monk Leodegar Maria Deschamps, who was born in Rennes in 1733 and died in 1774 as prior of a Benedictine monastery in Poitou. The first volume contained what Deschamps called at the time: “Le vrai système.” It was not published until 1865, together with parts of the second volume. It had been in manuscript form in the Poitiers library for so long. Nobody had paid any attention to it, except during the period in which it was written. What Deschamps – for the two pamphlets I mentioned also originated from him – wanted to express in 1769 and 1770 is now expressed in a strong first volume, which was published a century later by Professor Beaussire. That is what it contains. And the second volume contained a detailed correspondence and a presentation of all the efforts that Deschamps made at the time – let us put ourselves in the time when this was: namely before the outbreak of the French Revolution – described all the efforts that Deschamps made to somehow bring about the breakthrough of his “vrai système”. We learn there that the man really, I would say, stood between two fires: On the one hand, wherever his “vrai système” was discussed, he was warned that if the church found out about the “système”, he would be unconditionally subject to the harshest of punishments as a priest. On the other hand, even the so-called freethinkers showed very little interest in his writing. They were interested, but they did not want to do even the smallest thing that he asked: find a publisher. Rousseau, Robinet, Voltaire, the subtle Abbé Yvon, Barthélemy, even Diderot, they all knew this “vrai système”. It was even read to Diderot in his salon. He did not understand it immediately and therefore wanted to keep it to read through; but the good priest Deschamps was so anxious that he took it back because he did not want to put it into other hands. So he was always torn between these two things: on the one hand, he did not want his “vrai système” to be known; on the other hand, he wanted it to really take hold of humanity. Now let us take a look at what Deschamps presented as his “vrai système” in his first volume. He really did present what I just spoke of, which was bound to come up at some point. He calls that which is in the head (see drawing on p. 40) by designating it as force, “intelligence”; and he calls that which is out there, what I have drawn here in green, “comprehension”. And the significant thing is that he recognized: Yes, if one now conceives this whole mass of thoughts of the world in the spiritual eye, it is a web of world thoughts. If you look at only the individual object, it actually only has meaning when it is placed in the whole fabric of world thoughts. Fundamentally, it is nothing in itself. That which is something, which is there, is the whole fabric of world thoughts. And that is why Deschamps distinguishes between “le tout” and “tout.” He calls the whole fabric of world thought “le tout,” and he distinguishes “le tout” from “tout.” The first is the sum of all particulars. A subtle distinction, as you can see. “Le tout” is the whole, the universe, the cosmos; ‘tout’ is everything that is considered a detail. But what is considered a detail is at the same time, as he says, ‘rien’; ‘tout’ is ‘rien’; that is an equation. But ‘le tout’, that means in his sense: the universe of thought. The more materialistically minded minds, like Robinet and his ilk, could not grasp what he actually meant. And so no one could understand him. It could come to pass, because, so to speak, the materialistic tendency was already there, that the works of this Benedictine prior were left to molder. Because, it is not true that in 1865 a professor published the work – after all, that is nothing special. They always did that, you know, they collected and published such old tomes, regardless of their content. So the time that was to come, the time of materialism, had passed over what had taken hold in the lonely soul, the lonely spirit of a Benedictine prior. It is probably difficult for today's humanity to learn to delve deeper into the corresponding expressions, which are truly wonderful expressions, namely through the way in which one is placed after the other here : “tout, rien” he calls at the same time, in that he goes further to describe the world, “etre sensible”; and then he forms the expression “neantisme” also “rienisme”, yes even “neantete” and “rienite”. And now consider the relationship between n&antisme, rienisme, n&antete, rienite, and what we call Maya, and you will see how closely all these things are related, and how, into the age of material ism, I might say, that which instinctively still remained from the earlier consciousness of looking into a spiritual world, of which the last remnant remained: “le tout,” the cosmic world of thought. Of course, one must also recognize the greatness of such a thinker when he can no longer appeal to us 150 or 160 years later. I am convinced that if, for example, our dear female friends were to obtain these two volumes from some library, and if they were to work their way through the difficult philosophical part of the first half of the first volume and then read the second half of the first volume , they would become quietly furious at the views that Deschamps now develops regarding the position of women, for he has desperately unmodern views on the subject and, in the spirit of Plato, regards women from the point of view of communism. So we must not want to take everything in Deschamps' work at face value. But we must bear in mind what makes him such an interesting personality, especially if we want to consider the progress of the development of humanity. The important thing, however, is that in him we see, as it were, a spiritual view dying out. He is not even read, one could even say not even printed, although the most significant minds of his time knew him. Even a great mind such as Diderot did not even see fit to recommend its publication. All of this has been absorbed by the emerging materialism, As you can see, we must work vigorously and energetically. For it is, after all, a matter of nothing less than bringing a new impulse to the spiritual development of humanity in the face of what, I might say, has emerged so surely and so strongly that, from a certain point in time, it has trampled to death everything that still reminded people of anything other than a more or less materialistically conceived world view. And there was indeed tragedy in this personality of Deschamps. For he was, after all, a Benedictine priest. And the strange thing was this: Baron Holbach said in his “System of Nature”: Religion is the most harmful thing that the human race can have, religion is the greatest fraud, and should be eradicated as quickly as possible -; in contrast to this, Deschamps said: No, “le vrai systeme” must be adopted, and when people adopt “le vrai systeme”, then religion will disappear. But it must be preserved until people have accepted “le vrai systeme”. Then, so to speak, all the revealed truths behind it will be dropped, and in their place will be established the fabric of world thoughts. So this priest, who besides had to teach his boarding school boys the catechism and everything that religion had to offer every day, waited until his “vrai système” would become common property and religion would disappear as a result! There is something highly tragic about this. When we stand today before the outer world, which in many respects believes itself to be beyond materialism, but which is terribly mistaken in this respect, then it is of course primarily a matter of teach people again that what we have as a world of perception within us is a reflection of the truth, and that we are actually always outside of our bodies with our true spiritual-soul nature. I have already discussed this here in another context. I also pointed out at the time that I had presented this from an epistemological, purely philosophical point of view at the last philosophers' congress in Bologna. Unfortunately, however, none of the philosophers at the time understood what was actually meant philosophically. Even the chairman of the congress, the famous philosopher Paul Deußen, is one of them. After my speech, he merely said: Yes, I have heard something about Theosophy. I have read a brochure that Franz Hartmann wrote against Theosophy. That was all Deußen could say about my lecture, Deußen, one of the most well-known and, in the field of Indology, most revered philosophers of the present day. But we must be clear about the fact that it must really be the first step: to make plausible to the world consciousness of humanity this peculiar relationship of the spiritual and soul to the physical. Then the spirit that is at work in the course of human development will bring it about that people will recognize more than could be recognized in the 18th century, that people will see behind the “entendement” » the hierarchies and know that the «entendement» is that which the hierarchies live out as the thought content of the world, just as we live out the intelligence, «intelligence», through our being. But some things will necessarily be connected with this change in the spiritual consciousness of humanity, which we have been talking about now and also in these days in a certain context. For what matters most of all for us – and I must keep emphasizing this – is not just to absorb knowledge, but to connect with every fiber of our spiritual and soul being with the results of spiritual research, so that we learn to think, feel and sense in the spirit of spiritual research. Then, wherever we are in life, wherever karma has placed us, whether we have a more material or a more spiritual occupation, we will truly carry into the individual branches of life that which is spiritually felt, felt and thought in us. | And this must be said: anyone who expects a continuation, a real progress of culture from something other than such a spiritual deepening of humanity will wait in vain if it is left to him. The only thing that will really advance humanity is this spiritual deepening; for the events that otherwise take place can only be brought to a prosperous end if there are as many souls as possible that are able to feel, sense and think spiritually. Spiritual thinking must coincide with what is otherwise happening in the world if there is to be progress in the future of civilization. What must be lived out as the karma of materialism, you are now experiencing when you look around at what is happening in the world. It is the karma of materialism being lived out. And the one who can look into things will find in all details - even in all details - the karma of materialism being lived out. We will only find the way into a prosperous future if we find our way through what, I would like to say, under the leadership of Christ, in the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, arises for the soul's perception, if we orient this perception of the soul to the results of spiritual science. And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this intuitive perception and feeling has not to be drawn from spiritual science, and that everything else in the present world is opposed to it, and that we ourselves oppose spiritual science when we do not find ourselves ready to go, so to speak, completely into its spirit. For only spiritual science deals with the human being as such, with the human being as such, in relation to present-day humanity. Everything in present-day humanity is moving towards the goal of denying the human being as such and presenting something other than the human being as that for which one should fight, for which one should work, and of which one should think. As you know, my dear friends, I have been unable to go into the details of our contemporary phenomena since Christmas for reasons I am sure you can guess. But in general, at least, we must appeal again and again to the intuitive perception of those who want to stand in the realm of spiritual science: the greatest in the newer development contains the germs for what humanity must attain. The greatest thing has been achieved by the fact that, in certain currents of human culture, what can merely be called national culture, what can merely be called national aspiration, has receded. For the true inner impulse is for the national to be overcome by the spiritual in the course of human development. Anything that works towards the unification of world territories from a national point of view works against human progress. Precisely there, in the most beautiful measure, that which leads forward can occasionally develop where a part of a nationality lives, separated from the great mass of the nationality, cut off from an entire massif. How something really significant was achieved by the fact that, in addition to the Germans in the German Empire, there were also Germans in Austria and Germans in Switzerland, separated from the Germans in the German Empire. And it would be contrary not only to the course of what one otherwise thinks, but contrary to the idea of progress, to think that a uniformity under a national idea should unite these three limbs into a single nationality, disregarding precisely the great thing that comes from external political separation. And one cannot imagine how infinitely bitter and sad it is when the national point of view is asserted by certain quarters as the only one for the formation of political contexts, when, from a national point of view, demarcations are sought, separations are sought. One can stand aloof from all politics, but fall into mourning when this idea, which is contrary to all real progressive forces, comes to the fore. A sad Pentecost, my dear friends, when such words are forced from the soul. But let us hold fast to the other Pentecost, to which attention was drawn yesterday and the day before, to that Pentecost to which the third part of our saying refers: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.” Let us hold fast to the awareness that the human soul can find the way into the spiritual worlds, and that in our epoch of development the point has come when it is predetermined in the spiritual world that a new revelation should flow into humanity, a scientific revelation of spiritual knowledge that can take hold of human souls and give them what they need now and for the future. We may say it, my dear friends: when peaceful times come again in place of the present ones, we will be able to speak quite differently – if not some particularly repulsive karma should prevent it – than we have been able to speak on spiritual-scientific ground up to now. But all this presupposes that spiritual science is not just knowledge about us, but a real, a world-wide gift of Pentecost; that we really do not just unite spiritual science with our minds, but with our hearts. For then, through the union of spiritual science with the power of our hearts, what wants to come down from the spiritual world will gather into the fiery tongues that are the tongues of Pentecost. What wants to come down from the spiritual world as the gift of Pentecost lures into the human soul, not the intellect, but the heart, the warm heart that can feel with spiritual science, not just know about spiritual science. And the more your heart is warmed by the abstractions of spiritual science, which sometimes seem to chill, even though we almost always try to present only the concrete, the better. And the more we can even unite such a thought, as was expressed just yesterday, with our hearts, the better! We have said that as materialists we usually perceive only one half of the physical world: what grows, springs up and sprouts. But we must also look at destruction, although we must see that destruction does not impose itself on us as the one who sees destruction as a mere nothingness. In all that is like destruction, we must also see the ascent and rising of the spiritual. We must connect ourselves completely with what we can feel and inwardly experience through the results of spiritual science as the spiritual life, the spiritual. Then we will feel more and more the truth of the saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. We will have a scientific trust that we will be awakened to the spiritual world through the power of the spirit. And we will not feel with pride, but in all humility, what is to be brought into the world through spiritual science, but we will feel it especially in our hard time, in our time, which asks so many questions about our feelings that can only be answered when spiritual science can truly assert itself. I do not wish to stir up anyone's pride, but I would like to repeat a word that was once spoken when there was also much talk about what should happen through minds that had received something and were to carry it out. It was said to these minds - not to stir their pride either, but appealing to their humility -: “You are the salt of the earth.” Let us understand the word for ourselves in the right sense: “You are the salt of the earth.” And let us become aware that precisely when the fruits, the fruits of the blood-soaked earth will be there in the future, these fruits will not flourish without spirituality: that the earth will need salt even more afterwards. Take these words, imbued with heartfelt passion, into your own heart and soul on this Pentecost, when we want to truly imbue our entire being with the truth in the sense suggested: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus. antete, rienite, and what we call Maya, and you will see how closely all these things are related, and how, into the age of material ism, I might say, that which instinctively still remained from the earlier consciousness of looking into a spiritual world, of which the last remnant remained: “le tout,” the cosmic world of thought.

Of course, one must also recognize the greatness of such a thinker when he can no longer appeal to us 150 or 160 years later. I am convinced that if, for example, our dear female friends were to obtain these two volumes from some library, and if they were to work their way through the difficult philosophical part of the first half of the first volume and then read the second half of the first volume , they would become quietly furious at the views that Deschamps now develops regarding the position of women, for he has desperately unmodern views on the subject and, in the spirit of Plato, regards women from the point of view of communism. So we must not want to take everything in Deschamps' work at face value. But we must bear in mind what makes him such an interesting personality, especially if we want to consider the progress of the development of humanity. The important thing, however, is that in him we see, as it were, a spiritual view dying out. He is not even read, one could even say not even printed, although the most significant minds of his time knew him. Even a great mind such as Diderot did not even see fit to recommend its publication. All of this has been absorbed by the emerging materialism,

As you can see, we must work vigorously and energetically. For it is, after all, a matter of nothing less than bringing a new impulse to the spiritual development of humanity in the face of what, I might say, has emerged so surely and so strongly that, from a certain point in time, it has trampled to death everything that still reminded people of anything other than a more or less materialistically conceived world view.

And there was indeed tragedy in this personality of Deschamps. For he was, after all, a Benedictine priest. And the strange thing was this: Baron Holbach said in his “System of Nature”: Religion is the most harmful thing that the human race can have, religion is the greatest fraud, and should be eradicated as quickly as possible -; in contrast to this, Deschamps said: No, “le vrai systeme” must be adopted, and when people adopt “le vrai systeme”, then religion will disappear. But it must be preserved until people have accepted “le vrai systeme”. Then, so to speak, all the revealed truths behind it will be dropped, and in their place will be established the fabric of world thoughts. So this priest, who besides had to teach his boarding school boys the catechism and everything that religion had to offer every day, waited until his “vrai système” would become common property and religion would disappear as a result! There is something highly tragic about this.

When we stand today before the outer world, which in many respects believes itself to be beyond materialism, but which is terribly mistaken in this respect, then it is of course primarily a matter of teach people again that what we have as a world of perception within us is a reflection of the truth, and that we are actually always outside of our bodies with our true spiritual-soul nature. I have already discussed this here in another context. I also pointed out at the time that I had presented this from an epistemological, purely philosophical point of view at the last philosophers' congress in Bologna. Unfortunately, however, none of the philosophers at the time understood what was actually meant philosophically. Even the chairman of the congress, the famous philosopher Paul Deußen, is one of them. After my speech, he merely said: Yes, I have heard something about Theosophy. I have read a brochure that Franz Hartmann wrote against Theosophy. That was all Deußen could say about my lecture, Deußen, one of the most well-known and, in the field of Indology, most revered philosophers of the present day.

But we must be clear about the fact that it must really be the first step: to make plausible to the world consciousness of humanity this peculiar relationship of the spiritual and soul to the physical. Then the spirit that is at work in the course of human development will bring it about that people will recognize more than could be recognized in the 18th century, that people will see behind the “entendement” » the hierarchies and know that the «entendement» is that which the hierarchies live out as the thought content of the world, just as we live out the intelligence, «intelligence», through our being.

But some things will necessarily be connected with this change in the spiritual consciousness of humanity, which we have been talking about now and also in these days in a certain context. For what matters most of all for us – and I must keep emphasizing this – is not just to absorb knowledge, but to connect with every fiber of our spiritual and soul being with the results of spiritual research, so that we learn to think, feel and sense in the spirit of spiritual research. Then, wherever we are in life, wherever karma has placed us, whether we have a more material or a more spiritual occupation, we will truly carry into the individual branches of life that which is spiritually felt, felt and thought in us.

And this must be said: anyone who expects a continuation, a real progress of culture from something other than such a spiritual deepening of humanity will wait in vain if it is left to him. The only thing that will really advance humanity is this spiritual deepening; for the events that otherwise take place can only be brought to a prosperous end if there are as many souls as possible that are able to feel, sense and think spiritually. Spiritual thinking must coincide with what is otherwise happening in the world if there is to be progress in the future of civilization.

What must be lived out as the karma of materialism, you are now experiencing when you look around at what is happening in the world. It is the karma of materialism being lived out. And the one who can look into things will find in all details - even in all details - the karma of materialism being lived out.

We will only find the way into a prosperous future if we find our way through what, I would like to say, under the leadership of Christ, in the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, arises for the soul's perception, if we orient this perception of the soul to the results of spiritual science. And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this intuitive perception and feeling has not to be drawn from spiritual science, and that everything else in the present world is opposed to it, and that we ourselves oppose spiritual science when we do not find ourselves ready to go, so to speak, completely into its spirit. For only spiritual science deals with the human being as such, with the human being as such, in relation to present-day humanity. Everything in present-day humanity is moving towards the goal of denying the human being as such and presenting something other than the human being as that for which one should fight, for which one should work, and of which one should think.

As you know, my dear friends, I have been unable to go into the details of our contemporary phenomena since Christmas for reasons I am sure you can guess. But in general, at least, we must appeal again and again to the intuitive perception of those who want to stand in the realm of spiritual science: the greatest in the newer development contains the germs for what humanity must attain. The greatest thing has been achieved by the fact that, in certain currents of human culture, what can merely be called national culture, what can merely be called national aspiration, has receded. For the true inner impulse is for the national to be overcome by the spiritual in the course of human development. Anything that works towards the unification of world territories from a national point of view works against human progress. Precisely there, in the most beautiful measure, that which leads forward can occasionally develop where a part of a nationality lives, separated from the great mass of the nationality, cut off from an entire massif. How something really significant was achieved by the fact that, in addition to the Germans in the German Empire, there were also Germans in Austria and Germans in Switzerland, separated from the Germans in the German Empire. And it would be contrary not only to the course of what one otherwise thinks, but contrary to the idea of progress, to think that a uniformity under a national idea should unite these three limbs into a single nationality, disregarding precisely the great thing that comes from external political separation. And one cannot imagine how infinitely bitter and sad it is when the national point of view is asserted by certain quarters as the only one for the formation of political contexts, when, from a national point of view, demarcations are sought, separations are sought. One can stand aloof from all politics, but fall into mourning when this idea, which is contrary to all real progressive forces, comes to the fore.

A sad Pentecost, my dear friends, when such words are forced from the soul.

But let us hold fast to the other Pentecost, to which attention was drawn yesterday and the day before, to that Pentecost to which the third part of our saying refers: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.”

Let us hold fast to the awareness that the human soul can find the way into the spiritual worlds, and that in our epoch of development the point has come when it is predetermined in the spiritual world that a new revelation should flow into humanity, a scientific revelation of spiritual knowledge that can take hold of human souls and give them what they need now and for the future.

We may say it, my dear friends: when peaceful times come again in place of the present ones, we will be able to speak quite differently – if not some particularly repulsive karma should prevent it – than we have been able to speak on spiritual-scientific ground up to now. But all this presupposes that spiritual science is not just knowledge about us, but a real, a world-wide gift of Pentecost; that we really do not just unite spiritual science with our minds, but with our hearts. For then, through the union of spiritual science with the power of our hearts, what wants to come down from the spiritual world will gather into the fiery tongues that are the tongues of Pentecost.

What wants to come down from the spiritual world as the gift of Pentecost lures into the human soul, not the intellect, but the heart, the warm heart that can feel with spiritual science, not just know about spiritual science. And the more your heart is warmed by the abstractions of spiritual science, which sometimes seem to chill, even though we almost always try to present only the concrete, the better. And the more we can even unite such a thought, as was expressed just yesterday, with our hearts, the better!

We have said that as materialists we usually perceive only one half of the physical world: what grows, springs up and sprouts. But we must also look at destruction, although we must see that destruction does not impose itself on us as the one who sees destruction as a mere nothingness. In all that is like destruction, we must also see the ascent and rising of the spiritual. We must connect ourselves completely with what we can feel and inwardly experience through the results of spiritual science as the spiritual life, the spiritual. Then we will feel more and more the truth of the saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We will have a scientific trust that we will be awakened to the spiritual world through the power of the spirit. And we will not feel with pride, but in all humility, what is to be brought into the world through spiritual science, but we will feel it especially in our hard time, in our time, which asks so many questions about our feelings that can only be answered when spiritual science can truly assert itself. I do not wish to stir up anyone's pride, but I would like to repeat a word that was once spoken when there was also much talk about what should happen through minds that had received something and were to carry it out. It was said to these minds - not to stir their pride either, but appealing to their humility -: “You are the salt of the earth.”

Let us understand the word for ourselves in the right sense: “You are the salt of the earth.” And let us become aware that precisely when the fruits, the fruits of the blood-soaked earth will be there in the future, these fruits will not flourish without spirituality: that the earth will need salt even more afterwards.

Take these words, imbued with heartfelt passion, into your own heart and soul on this Pentecost, when we want to truly imbue our entire being with the truth in the sense suggested: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.