Central Europe Between East and West

GA 174a — 4 May 1918, Munich

Twelfth Lecture

From the observations we made here the day before yesterday, and perhaps also in a broader sense from the public observations of these days, it will be seen that there is a certain necessity for humanity to develop spiritual-scientific interests, especially in the present day. For this spiritual science, in addition to its other tasks in the narrower sense for the individual human being, for his mind, his needs in life, his soul matters, is in a position to create clarity about certain things that man in the present must absolutely consider. And it is from this point of view that I have emphasized the necessity of regarding the seriousness with which spiritual science must be taken by those who approach it today, and of allowing it to appeal above all to the soul. We must try to explore in the most diverse directions how humanity could end up in such a catastrophic situation. For what this catastrophic situation means is still not considered by many people today in its full depth and with full seriousness. But the time will come when the events themselves, the facts themselves, will reveal this seriousness in a completely different way than is already the case today. But precisely on the basis of spiritual science, one should realize that it is not enough to wait until the very last moment, so to speak, to understand what one needs to understand in the face of the deeply dormant demands of the time. Above all, it is necessary to be prepared to face the fact that certain truths, which are necessary for humanity in the present and in the near future, are uncomfortable, that it is much more comfortable to sing the praises of how we have come so gloriously far in this or that respect, through the great achievements of cultural studies achievements, than to point out what is effective and alive in the relationships of human beings themselves, and what is effective and alive in particular in order to condition the character of contemporary humanity, so to speak. Contemporary humanity is challenged in many ways, it is necessarily led to understand this and that; but some things that are to be understood are just uncomfortable to understand, and require a certain unreserved, unprejudiced assessment of one's own human nature.

Certain tendencies exist in the development of time. Hypothetically, one can say that it would indeed be possible to continue to regard such things as something great, such as the so-called examination of aptitude mentioned the day before yesterday. Certain contemporary educators, namely, propagate these things, regard them as something tremendously great, and the rest of humanity disdains to form an opinion about these things, finds it inconvenient not to sleep in the face of such Ahrimanic tendencies, as they are introduced by something like the aptitude test and many other things. If such endeavors, such ideals – and of course they are ideals too – are to continue to exist, then this will have a profound influence on the whole development of the human soul, and above all a very specifically configured influence on the basic powers of the human soul: thinking, feeling and willing. One may hypothetically ask oneself, for it is not to take place, it is to be remedied by the efforts of those who profess the anthroposophical world view, but hypothetically one may ask oneself in order to know what one has to do: What configuration must the three main soul forces of man take on if such tendencies, as they are currently prevailing from the materialistic attitude, from the Ahrimanic, were to take hold alone, if they were not countered by spiritual striving, spiritual will? However great and powerful the influence of technical progress, which is fed by natural science, and of progress in other fields of natural science, may be, this very progress in natural science, this very structure of present-day thinking, will gradually impress more and more the character of narrow-mindedness, of limitation, on human imagination, on human thinking. There is no other way to characterize it, because in the broadest sense, I would say, the beginning of this narrow-mindedness, this limitation, is already apparent today, and it will consist in the fact that one will sin more and more

against something that was asserted in a public lecture yesterday: one will sin against opening up the whole soul to the world. More and more, people will limit themselves to listening theoretically and intellectually to what the concepts and ideas say. I also wanted to publicly point out that two people can say exactly the same thing with words, and one is by no means justified in thinking that what comes from both people is the same.

Today we live in the age of programs. The age of programs is precisely the age of intellectualism. What is it that people most like to do today when they devote themselves to the good of humanity? They found associations for all kinds of causes and set up programs and ideals. These can, of course, be very ingenious, very benevolent, very plausible; for the development of humanity they need not be worth a shot of powder. But one goes out of one's way to ask oneself: What does the person in question want? And if the person in question says – now, let's take something abstract, today one loves abstractions –: I want to cultivate universal philanthropy, then one thinks: What better thing could one do? Of course, one must join such an association! But we live in a time when, due to a certain oversaturation that culture has attained, it is extremely easy to come up with the most beautiful programs and the most beautiful ideas. In this regard, one can be a very limited person in terms of one's sense of and interest in the overall well-being of humanity and its true concerns. I might add that today, in the more delicate matters of culture, one can sometimes be right in the higher sense about things in which, according to the opinion of very many people, one is perhaps completely wrong. Thus, for example, today one may be led to set a higher value on poetic stammering which really and truly heralds the power of the inner soul than on perfect verses which are recognized as such simply because, as regards the outward configuration of poetry, language itself, the spirit of language, writes verses today and only employs the human soul to do so. Today, anyone can make brilliant verses in terms of the old verse style, even if they have no strong soul power. Such things must be taken into account in a time when great, eminently great questions arise for the development of mankind, as in this present time.

So it must be said: People must learn to open their whole soul to whole souls; people must learn to hold less and less to the content of what is said, and they must learn to gain more and more insight into the knowledge and power of what is brought into the world by this or that personality. We are, after all, experiencing the most terrible world-historical drama, that people all over the world worship principles such as those emanating from Woodrow Wilson, because these principles are plausible, because these principles cannot be refuted. Of course they are plausible, and of course they cannot be refuted, but they are as old as human thought; they have always been said that way. In all these things, there is nothing that is connected with the real, concrete, immediately present tasks. But people find it uncomfortable to put themselves in the position of the real, concrete, immediately present tasks, to develop the flexibility of thought. For this flexibility of thinking is part of the process of entering into the immediately concrete. Of course, it sometimes takes a long time to find one's way into this concrete; but today it is necessary to understand such things, to enter a little into the soul of the development of humanity.

There is a city in which a southern German population lives. In this city, a very important personality arose in the 18th century: Johann Heinrich Lambert. Kant, who was a contemporary of Johann Heinrich Lambert, called Lambert the greatest genius of his century; for if only Lambert's ideas had taken the place of the so-called Kant-La Place theory, something very significant would have emerged. This Lambert grew up in a city, which is now a southern German city, as the son of a tailor, and showed special talent at the age of fourteen. His father petitioned the city's council for support. After much effort, the council finally agreed to donate forty francs for the talented boy, on the condition that he never again request support. A hundred years had to pass before the city erected a monument to this man in the 1840s, the same city that had chased him out when he was fourteen. He was forced to leave the city and achieved greatness through special circumstances in Berlin. Now there is a beautiful monument, with a globe at the top to suggest that this genius was born out of this great, powerful city, which was able to harbor such geniuses, that the genius who knew how to embrace the world comes from this very soil!

Sometimes it takes even longer than a hundred years to realize what is teeming with talent. That may be, it may have been until our time. But how often has it been emphasized among us that the time has come when people must awaken to a free, self-reliant consciousness, in which people can no longer afford to be unaware of what is going on around them. This time is approaching with giant strides. People must learn to unlock their souls in order to see what is really there. Because, as I said, thinking is threatened by the peculiar configuration of materialistic culture, imagination is limited and becomes narrow-minded. Spiritual science provides concepts and ideas that do not allow one to become narrow-minded in one's thinking. One is constantly being asked, precisely through spiritual scientific concepts, to look at a thing from the most diverse sides. That is why even today many people in the spiritual science ranks are annoyed when they hear: Now a new cycle is coming, the matter will be approached from a completely different angle. — But it is inevitable that things are approached from the most diverse angles, and that we finally get beyond what I would call the absolutization of judgment. The truth, grasped in the spirit, cannot be well expressed in sharp contours because the spirit is a moving thing. So spiritual science works against narrow-mindedness in relation to thinking. Of course, it is difficult to say this to the present, but it is necessary.

The second faculty observed in the soul is feeling. Regarding feeling, regarding the world of feeling, what tendency does humanity strive towards from its materialistic culture? One can say that it has come a long way precisely in this area. In the realm of feeling, materialistic “culture” produces narrow-mindedness, philistinism. Our materialistic culture is particularly inclined to grow into the gigantic. Narrow-mindedness of interests! In the narrowest circle, people want to close themselves more and more. But today man is no longer called to close himself in the narrowest circle, today he is called to recognize how he is a tone in the great cosmic symphony.

Let us once again consider something, in order to immediately look at what is meant here from a comprehensive point of view, something that has already been mentioned here. I would like to say: you can calculate – and today people believe a lot in calculation – in what a wonderful way man fits into the cosmos. In one minute, we take about eighteen breaths. If you multiply that by twenty-four hours in a day, you get 25,920 breaths. Twenty-four hours, 25,920 breaths! Now try to calculate the following: You know that every year the vernal point, the rising point of the sun in spring, moves a little further along the vault of heaven. Let's go back to very distant times. The sun rose in Taurus in spring, then a little further in Taurus and again a little further until it entered Aries, and then again further, and so the sun goes around, apparently of course. How many years does it take for the Sun to move forward a little bit at a time in this jerky manner so that it arrives back at the same point? The Sun makes many such jerks: it takes 25,920 years to move forward in this way, which means that the Sun completes one revolution in the great cosmos in 25,920 years, in as many years as we take breaths in one day. Imagine what a wonderful coincidence that is! We breathe 25,920 times in a day, the sun advances, and when it has made the jerk 25,920 times, like our inner jerk, a breath, then it has come around the cosmos once. So we are a reflection of the macrocosm with our breathing.

It goes further: the average lifespan – this can of course go much further, but some people die earlier – the lifespan is on average seventy, seventy-one years. What is this actually, this human life? It is also a sum of breaths. Only they are different breaths. In ordinary physical breathing, we suck in the air and expel it. In a twenty-four-hour day, if we are ordinary, righteous people and do not go out at night in rags, we take a deep inhalation of our ego and the astral body when we wake up, and exhale our ego and astral body again when we fall asleep: that is also a breath. Every day is a breath of our physical and etheric body in relation to the I and the astral body. How often do we do that in a lifetime that lasts about seventy, seventy-one years? Calculate how many days a person actually lives: 25,920 days! That means that not only in one day do we imitate the course of the sun in the world by developing as many breaths as the sun makes jolts until it returns to the same point in the cosmos, but we also perform the great breath, the inhalation of the I and the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies, and the exhalation of the I and the astral body into the seventy-one years just as often as we breathe in one day: 25,920 times, which is the number of times the sun moves before it returns to the same point. We could cite many such things that show us how we, with our human lives, stand in the great harmony of the universe in terms of numbers and otherwise, and they would be no less surprising, no less magnificent, than if we feel what I have just explained. Much is hidden in the circumstances in which man stands in the world, but this hiddenness has its profound effect because it is actually the same as what was understood in ancient times as the harmony of the spheres.

This, indeed, calls forth our interest in the whole world. We are gradually learning to understand that we know nothing about ourselves as human beings if we restrict our interest in a philistine way to our immediate surroundings. But this has become more and more the characteristic of modern times, philistinism! Indeed, philistinism has become the basic tenor of the religious world view; and from there this basic tenor of philistinism radiated into many minds. Go back to the first centuries of Christianity: there was a doctrine that was grandiose. It was for that time. Today it must be replaced by our spiritual-scientific view, because different times make different demands on humanity, but at that time it was a grandiose doctrine, Gnosticism. Consider the magnificent way in which these Gnostics thought, in the research of the eons, in the research of the various spiritual hierarchies, how this small earth is aligned with the great cosmic world evolution with its many, many entities, but in whose ranks man is placed after all. It took flexibility of thought, a certain goodwill to develop one's concepts, not to let them calcify, become slimy, as one does now, in order to rise to Gnosis. Then came — not Christianity, but Christian confessionality. And ask around today what most official representatives of Christianity hate most of all: Gnosis. And they blacken anthroposophy most of all for that reason; they do not concern themselves with anthroposophy itself, they are too lazy for that, but when they glance into some book they have a dark suspicion, a dark notion: it could be some kind of gnosis too, for heaven's sake! We must take in new ideas, we must make the mind agile! We have finally brought people to simplicity of thought, especially in the religious sphere. It is said that one cannot gauge what will come of it when one soars to such lofty heights! – It is said: Man can indeed come to reach the highest divine in the simplest mind; there is no need to make an effort, but the simplest, childlike mind can reach the highest divine at every moment.

Yes, we must see through these things! It is important to really look at these things, because the prevailing mood of modern times, the philistinism, emanates from these things. That is why the religious sentiment in the various denominations has become so philistine, because what I have just described underlies it. Today it flatters people who pretend to be modest, but who are actually terribly immodest at heart, because immodesty, megalomania, is a fundamental characteristic of our time. Everything is judged, no matter how difficult it is experienced, no matter how much difficulty it bears on the forehead: it is judged, even by the one who can well know that he has not particularly endeavored to much experience, who only endeavored to arrive at the self-evident: that no effort must be made to recognize God, but that God must surrender Himself at all times to the simplest, most childlike mind if it wants Him. So one must see that philistinism must be pushed back by spiritual science before all else. But philistinism is rooted quite differently than is often assumed today, and many of those who believe that they have truly escaped philistinism are in fact mired in it up to their necks. Many “isms” and many modernisms that make it their program not to be like the philistines are actually nothing more than the most masked philistinism. That is the second point. In the realm of thinking and imagination, the encroaching narrow-mindedness must be pushed back; in the realm of feeling, the advancing philistinism. Broad-mindedness of interest must take its place, the will to really look at what is going on in the great tableau of earthly development.

The day before yesterday, we tried to characterize the effect of the folk spirits in concrete terms. These are archangels. From this you could already see that these folk spirits are connected with the places where certain people develop on earth. The folk spirit in Italy works through the air, and it works through everything liquid in the areas of present-day France and so on, as I have characterized it. But naturally these things intersect with many others, and one must be clear about the fact that people live side by side on earth, that certain phases of development are left behind in certain areas. In some cases, people advance them, in others they even cause them to decline. Now there is something tremendously significant to observe. If we regard the whole earth as an organism and ask ourselves: What is happening all over the earth? we can begin by looking at various areas of Asia, the Asian East, as it is called. In this Asian East, there are many souls incarnating today that, due to their karma, due to what they have brought with them from previous lives on earth, are still stuck in earlier peculiarities of human development. These are souls seeking bodies in which they can still be dependent on physical development up to a certain advanced age. The normal thing is that today one is only dependent up to the twenty-seventh year. This is what represents the fundamental character of our time: that one is dependent on physical development until the age of twenty-seven. This is very significant in our time. One understands much in our time when one considers these things. I have already pointed this out here.

I once asked myself: What would a person be like who was supposed to be the very type of our time, how would he have to enter this time with all his work, with all his activity? — He would have to, so to speak, exclude from himself everything that is otherwise brought to people from outside and affects them, leaving them to their own devices until the age of twenty-seven. He would have to be what is called a self-made man, a self-made person. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should be little affected by what the normal, the representative in our time, should be. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should develop entirely on his own. Then, just after he has made of himself what a modern man can make of himself, then, for example, he would have to be elected to parliament. Isn't it true that being elected to parliament is what it means to be in touch with the times today? Then, when he has been elected to parliament and after a few years has even become a minister, then he is in a sense stigmatized, then people notice later when one falls over in one direction or another and has this or that mishap. And then? How must it continue? One can no longer develop, one remains the type of one's time, one is the right representative of one's time. There are people like that today, as I said here some time ago: Lloyd George, for example. There is no one who expresses more characteristically and typically what is present in our time than Lloyd George, who by the age of twenty-seven had brought forth everything that a person can draw from the physical body. He was an autodidact, he came into life early, into socialism, and learned early on that at twenty-seven, you belong in Parliament. He was elected to Parliament and very soon became one of the most feared speakers there, even one of the most feared squinters – that's what they say: squinters – he always sat there and lurked when others were talking. There was something special about the way he looked up, that was well known to Lloyd George. Then the Campbell-Bannerman ministry came. Then they said: What do we do about Lloyd George? He's dangerous. It's best to make him a minister. And so they took him into the ministry. Yes, but to which ministerial post do we transfer him? He is a very talented person! Well, we transfer him to a position where he understands nothing. There he will be most useful, there he will be the least trouble! - He was made Minister of Railways and Shipbuilding. In a few months he acquired what he needed. He made the greatest reforms, the greatest things.

Surely, the type of man of the present cannot be better described than by portraying Lloyd George. It is as if it is concentrated, as if it is the essence of the materialism of the present, and one can understand much of the present if one is able to go into something like this. That is how it is in the middle of the world, I would like to say, between the Asian East and the American West. It is particularly the case in European culture that up to the age of twenty-seven one can extract from the bodily-physical what can also be significant for the soul-spiritual. Then a spiritual impulse must be aroused in the soul if one wants to progress, for the physical body has nothing more to give. Therefore, in a person like Lloyd George, everything that the present gives by itself is there, but he also has nothing of what is to be freely achieved. The present naturally gives much genius, many talents, but it gives nothing spiritual by itself. That must be conquered through freedom. But in Asia there is still ample opportunity to find bodies that allow the soul-spiritual development to continue beyond the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth year. Therefore, souls incarnate there that still want to gain something from the physical body beyond this time. That is why there is still a spiritual culture, a culture that insists that the things around us be looked at spiritually, that the spiritual be recognized in the world. Of course, there is also a great deal of decadence in the East because materialism has spread, and since it is least suitable for the East, decadence has the greatest effect there. But among those who are the leading people, you can see how a natural spirituality is still present. They inwardly despise European materialistic culture in the most comprehensive sense. People like Rabindranath Tagore, who recently gave a speech about the spirit of Japan, who says: We Orientals naturally adopt European achievements for our external technical cultural conditions; but we put them in our sheds, in our stables, and certainly don't let them enter our living rooms, this European culture - because the spiritual is a matter of course for him. Today, we need to know such things, for these things are the basic forces of what is happening in the world, and on which world events depend today.

You will say: Yes, but we do have, for example, in our Central European culture, a firm foundation for a spirituality that is even based on clear, bright ideas! — We do have that too, and we can speak of this spirituality in the same way that I tried to speak of a forgotten current in German intellectual life in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). In order to be imbued with a spirituality that would truly go beyond what Oriental spirituality has achieved in the development of humanity, we need only imbibe the wonderful imaginations that we find, for example, in Herder or Goethe. Oriental culture has not produced anything as great as Herder, who sees a picture of the new creation of the world in every new sunrise and describes it in a magnificent way. Those who do not want to be philistines today are still such philistines that they say: You no longer care about something that is so ancient – and if you ask people about Herder, it has long been forgotten. And the Oriental, when he judges the circumstances, naturally judges that which lives in the outer real current of Central European culture.

Read the perceptive Chinese scholar Xu Hung-Ming, who has sympathetically described Central European culture, or read the lecture that Rabindranath Tagore recently gave. Then you will see that people are asking themselves: What is the position of this Europe in the overall progress of humanity? — They have an inkling that this Central Europe would be called upon to lead people beyond what spiritualism has given them itself. But then they look to see whether this Central Europe has not failed to develop the great talents, the great seeds that are there, that it contains. People say that they had a Goethe; yes, but these honest, materialistic Germans do not know how to make use of him! When his last grandchild died, there was another opportunity to introduce Goetheanism into German spiritual life. Under the truly incomparably magnificent aegis of a German princess, the Goethe-Schiller Archive was founded. A great impulse was given in the 1880s. The Goethe Society was also founded, but they were constantly embarrassed to appoint someone to the top who would really have dealt with the spirituality of Goethe. They did not find that worthy, and in the last election they did not put a person at the head of the Goethe Society who would be steeped in the spirituality inspired by Goethe, but they appointed a former finance minister. Yes, but after such things the world must judge what is happening in Central Europe! Today, Goethe's heritage is administered by a former finance minister who, admittedly, has the symptomatic first name “Kreuzwendedich” (which means “Turn Yourself Around”). But I don't know if, if the symbolism of this first name were to be fulfilled, something better would take its place.

These things could only change if the place of narrow-minded interests were taken by great interests, if people really looked at how the impulses work across the earth, how the bodies in the east, I would like to say, make a somewhat spirituality for the souls who want to incarnate in such bodies today with a retarded spirituality, which still gives something of the physical body for the souls beyond the twenty-seventh year. In the East, people remain at an earlier stage of human development, they stop at what humanity has already gone through. Here in the middle, people have reached the point where a change must take place, where they can draw what is necessary from the physical body up to the age of twenty-seven. But for the further development of the human soul, if one does not want to grow old early and does not want to have nothing of one's youth, one must have a spiritual-soul impulse, a free spiritual impulse, not, like the Oriental, an unfree spiritual impulse.

If we go further west, to America, humanity is so constituted that it lags behind, that it does not reach this level. In the Orient, humanity has, in a sense, regressed to earlier stages; in the middle, you have the normal age; in the West, in America – I characterized it the day before yesterday – the subterranean of the earth is at work. Even on such minds as Woodrow Wilson, it has the effect of being obsessed by their own words, their own principles. They are like prematurely aged children, but the word has a slightly different connotation. They cannot achieve the full impact of what can be achieved up to the age of twenty-seven. Once we understand what makes such a strong impression on many people in the present day, we will ask ourselves, for example: How could it be that a mind like Woodrow Wilson's, which with its age never absorbed more than one absorbs up to the age of twenty-seven, could become the great world schoolmaster? — The breadth of interest to really bring such things to mind in a genuine way, you just don't have that. You don't want to get out of philistinism!

That remarkable trend in the evolution of humanity, which is characterized by the following: from the East to the West, from the preservation of an earlier time through the normal middle to the decadence of the West - this is to be found in the development of nations and the earth, not in the individual human being. Interest in it must be developed so that one knows what impulses are at work across the earth and so that one can evaluate them. And for a long time, the main influence here in the center of Europe came from the south, with the culture of Central Europe being permeated by Greco-Roman influences. The conservative nature of the south was adopted. Today we stand at a turning point. A particularly progressive element of the north must permeate the population of central Europe. And this special, I would say, favorable impulse of the Hyperborean time for today must pass through our soul. This is what must be taken into account. Otherwise, if man does not open his eyes and soul to these great impulses of human evolution, the earth will take a wrong direction of development, will not become humus for the cosmic world structure, and that which the last epoch of evolution of the earth should mean must be taken up by another planet.

There are great interests at stake. It is necessary to work one's way out of philistinism and develop towards great interests. Only by acquiring such interests can one come to evaluate certain phenomena of our present time in the right way. It can be clearly seen that human natures are bifurcating in our time. This is only the beginning today; but people are bifurcating. Some are natures that, so to speak, harden the physical body within themselves. They develop it in a certain hardening up to the age of twenty-seven, then they stop, they reject the spiritual-soul. If they do not have constant stimulation to stir up humanity, to lead humanity to disaster, like Lloyd George, then they become dull, stale, and turn into right-wing philistinism, becoming dull. In one direction lies the dulling of humanity. The others abandon themselves to all the driving, pulsating forces of the physical body until they are twenty-seven years old, drawing all spirituality out of the physical body. There is much in the physical. Do not forget, we all come into the world with tremendous wisdom; we only have to transform this wisdom into consciousness, to transform what is full of wisdom in our entire physical being. Spiritual science attempts to bring everything in the nerves, blood and muscles into consciousness in a harmonious, spiritualized way. Spiritual science rejects not only the dull-witted, but also, in many cases, those - and there are more and more of them - who, pulsating with life, feel until they reach sexual maturity and until the age of twenty-seven that which boils and seethes as genius in the nerves, blood and muscles. These overheated natures, which, so to speak, burn up human life, are becoming more and more common. They already occur extremely frequently today. They fill the lunatic asylums and so on. But it is not recognized that the real healing lies in anthroposophically 'oriented spiritual science.

A fine typical nature has indeed become a world celebrity in recent times. That is the philosopher Otto Weininger. Right, Otto Weininger was a person who, in the most chaotic way, unrefined, disharmonized, brought out what lies in the nerve, muscle, blood, and then wrote the book 'Sex and Character', which has become world-famous, and which people who fall for anything have also fallen for here. So that the Philistines were also taken in, who did not understand that, despite all the nonsense and repulsiveness, it was an idea, a revelation of an elementary fact about nerve, blood and muscle. The elemental approaches such people, out of their humanity itself, that which spiritual science would like to develop — only in an orderly, harmonious way. Such people, because they have not learned it from spiritual science — there they would learn it properly — but because their nerves, their blood, their muscles demand it, must ask a question that humanity must necessarily ask itself today. Without this question, humanity will not advance. It is: How can I, having entered the physical world through birth or conception, continue the development of my spiritual and soul existence from the last death to this birth? Such and similar questions, as we raise them in spiritual science, as we regard them as fundamental questions of progressive spiritual culture, must be raised and will be raised by those who boil up what is in nerve, blood and muscle.

You see, there is a chapter in Otto Weininger's work that is extraordinarily interesting. He asked himself: Why did I actually come into this world? — And he answered this question in his own way, out of what I have just characterized, out of the wisdom that lies in muscle, blood and nerve, but in a way that consumes and burns the human being. He asked himself: Why am I drawn out of the spiritual world, where I used to be, into earthly life? He found no answer except this: Because I was a coward, because I did not want to remain alone in the spiritual world and therefore sought the connection with other people. I did not have the courage to be alone, I sought the protection of the mother's womb. These were perfectly honest answers that he gave himself. Why do we have no memory, he asked, of what happened before birth? Because we have become that way through birth! — Literally he says: Because we have sunk so low that we have lost consciousness. If man had not lost himself at birth, he would not have to search for and find himself.

These are typical phenomena; today they still occur sporadically. They are those who, in their youth, extract from blood, nerve and muscle that which can only flourish in the whole human process if it is clarified and harmonized by that which spiritual science is to give. For this, however, the interests of general human life must be broadened. Philistinism must recede. The fact that people are locked in a narrow circle of interests must be systematically combated. Certain questions must take on a completely different form than they have done up to now. How has the religious development of the last few millennia itself structured the question that still binds people to the spiritual to some extent? A materialistically educated, witty person of the present day, who has taken a high position in a certain circle, once said to me: If you compare the state with the church, you get the opinion that the church still has it easier than the state. Well, I will not say anything about the value of this judgment, but that man thought that the church had an easier time than the state, because the state administers life, the church death, and people are more afraid of death than of life; therefore the church has an easier time. He considered this nonsense, of course, because he was a materialist.

But this chapter too has actually been brought into a rather selfish channel. Basically, people today ask: What happens to my soul and spiritual life when I have passed through the gate of death? — And there are many selfish impulses in this. Under the influence of spiritual science, the question of immortality in particular would take on a completely different form. In the future, people will not only ask: To what extent is the spiritual and mental life after death a continuation of life here on earth? But rather: To what extent is life on earth a continuation of the life I used to live in the spiritual and mental world? - Then one will be able to look at something like the following.

When a person passes through the gate of death, the imaginative presentation is very strong at first; a comprehensive world of images unfolds imaginatively. I would call this an unrolling of the world of images. The second third of the life between death and a new birth is filled mainly with inspirations. Inspirations occur in the human life in the second third of this life between death and a new birth. And intuitions in the last third. Now intuitions consist in the human being transferring himself with his self, his soul, into other beings, and the end of these intuitions consists in his transferring himself into the physical body. This transfer into the physical body through birth is merely the continuation of the mainly intuitive life of the last third between death and a new birth. And this must actually occur when the human being enters the physical plane; it must be a particularly characteristic trait in children: the ability to place themselves in the other life. They must do what others do, not what comes naturally to them, but imitate what the other does.

Why did I have to describe, when I was talking about “The education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science”, that children in the first seven years are mainly imitators? Because imitation, because putting oneself in the place of others, is the continuation of the intuitive world that exists in the last third of life between death and a new birth. If one looks at the life of the child here in a truly meaningful way, one can still see the life between death and a new birth streaming in and shining. The question of immortality will have to be posed on this basis: to what extent is life here on earth a continuation of the soul-spiritual life? But then people will also learn to take this life on earth very seriously, but not in an egotistical sense. Above all, they will adhere to a sense of responsibility, which is based on the realization that they are continuing here what is imposed on them by the fact that they have brought something with them as an inheritance from the soul-spiritual. It will mean an enormous change in the way people think when they speak from the other point of view. For that which the soul experiences between death and a new birth, this great spiritual realm, which is experienced in imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, that is the here and now for there; and what we experience here is the beyond for there. And the desire to understand and honor this Hereafter will become part of the newly formulated question of immortality, which will intervene in the spiritual development of humanity in a less egotistical way than the question of immortality has often done in the religious development of the past millennia.

I wanted to describe such things in order to show how humanity should emerge from philistinism, in order to show how one is not a philistine. You are not a philistine if you can go beyond your narrowest interest, and if you also have an interest in the fact that here on earth you take 25,920 breaths in one day, which corresponds to the number of days in an earthly life and also to the 'jerk' of the sun as it orbits in the cosmic ellipse. Our interest expands beyond what has led to the fact that there is a forgotten stream in German intellectual life; our interest expands beyond what is configured in the spirit all over the earth, what the keynote of oriental, middle, Western spiritual development: how the Asian spiritual development is dependent, so to speak, on an eastern current, which entered the West in a state of decadence, how the middle current, initially dependent on the South, will become dependent on the North in the future. These things lead us to the great plan of human development, overcome philistinism, correctly adjust our feelings in relation to human development and teach us to really feel for what lives in humanity as impulses.

And the will: the will also develops in a very specific way in the material impulses. It develops in such a way that people become more and more unskillful, and in the great classical sense, more and more unskillful. What can a person do today? The narrowest thing he is trained for puts him in a small circle. What develops in spiritual science in terms of concepts, feelings, and impulses extends to the limbs. When someone really immerses themselves in spiritual science, they become adept, adapt to their environment, and sometimes learn things in the course of their lives that, when they are still very young, show no aptitude for. If properly grasped, spiritual science will also make people adept. Today, people are not adept at even the smallest things. You meet people who do not know the simplest tasks, you meet gentlemen who cannot even sew on a button if it has come off, much less anything else. But it is important that people can become versatile again, that they can adapt to their surroundings, that this confinement to the narrowest circle and thus the becoming clumsy for the world be overcome.

However strange it may sound, humanity has this threefold task for the present and the near future with regard to thinking, feeling and willing: that narrow-mindedness be overcome and a flexible way of finding one's way into the circumstances of the world take hold, that philistinism be overcome and generous interests take hold of human hearts, that clumsiness be overcome and people become skillful and are also educated in skill in the most diverse areas of life. Learn to understand the world in the most diverse areas of life! Today, of course, we are doing the opposite of all this. We are heading towards clumsiness, philistinism, and narrow-mindedness, and these are the necessary consequences of the materialistic way of thinking. Of course, not everyone can learn to set a broken leg themselves, but there is no need to cultivate clumsiness to the point where someone no longer has any sense of how to help themselves in the simplest of cases of illness and the like. What matters is skillful understanding in order to cope with life in the most diverse situations.

With the advent of this newer time, have we not seen clearly how things have actually developed? Anyone who has asked around with discerning eyes about the phenomena of the present in the last decades has clearly seen that the sense of developing a worldview, of making impulses for a worldview the subject of consideration, was only present in those who at the same time had the will to develop purely materialistic worldview interests, namely in the field of socialism. Basically, consideration of ideological issues only occurred where people wanted to reform the world in a socialist sense. If one came up above the socialist flood, there was disinterest; at most narrow clique interests, clinging to the old, or if one thought one was grasping at something new, it was abstract words, the forerunners of Wilsonianism, as it raged particularly badly in the so-called liberal parties in the second half of the 19th century. There was no will to penetrate into the intellectual and spiritual impulses of the world, as socialism wanted to penetrate into the material; there was dullness where the bourgeoisie began – on the whole, of course; exceptions are disregarded. Those present are always excepted, that is a matter of politeness.

Now, to confront these phenomena and to answer such questions as have been raised today, also in the sense in which we have tried to answer them today, is basically one and the same thing. For great things are connected with these matters. In the East of Europe, we see something being prepared, I would say in the extract, for which Europe today has terribly little understanding. We have often pointed out the developmental germs of this European East in our field. This European East wants to learn to understand that all human life has meaning! And when the sixth post-Atlantic cultural epoch approaches, the European East is to show in the evolution of the earth that all human life has a meaning, and not just believe as true what is taught in school in one's youth. The East should show that man is in a process of development until death, that every year brings something new, and that when one passes through the gate of death, one is still connected with the earthly and brings wisdom with one even after death. What does the soul element want, which until recently could be called Russian, and which is now provisionally entering a state of chaos, but will find its way into the development of European culture and thus into the cultural development of all humanity? What does this element of the East want?

It wants to see the dawn of an understanding that all human life is in a state of development, and that the moment of death is only an especially important moment in this development. This principle must indeed find followers and confessors in Central Europe, and from such prerequisites as we have mentioned, it will find them. But until this principle is recognized, people will always believe that the younger you are, the more you can have a point of view. The youngest badgers and badger females today have their own fixed point of view, and basically have nothing of the great expectation and hope that every year new secrets will be revealed, that the moment of death will reveal new secrets. The European East is developing souls that today are still developing an understanding in the subconscious that man is wisest and can judge best about earthly, human conditions precisely when he dies. And from these souls living in the East today, there will arise those who do not merely seek advice from the young badgers, from the parliaments, on how to decide on human affairs, but who also seek advice from the dead, who will learn to establish contact with the dead and to make fruitful the contact with the dead here for earthly development. In the future people will ask: What do the dead say about it? And they will find spiritual paths if they delve so deeply in spiritual science that they ask the dead, not just the living, when it comes to deciding the great matters of people here on earth. That is what the East wants. And never has anything clashed more badly than it is happening today in the European East. For that which is the soul of this European East is the exact opposite of what, in the form of Trotskyism or Leninism, has been superimposed on it today from the purest, albeit self-misunderstanding, materialism of the present. Never before in the development of mankind have two things that are so incongruous collided as the spiritual germ of the East and materialistic Leninism, this caricature, this most grotesque caricature of human cultural progress, which has no sense or understanding of anything truly spiritual but which is so understandable in terms of the fundamental nerve of the present day. The future will learn to recognize this.

That, my dear friends, is what I just wanted to tell you in summary with regard to such things that should ignite interest in our hearts. One must have understanding for such things; one must not remain dull to what is going on in the deeper sense in the souls. That is what I wanted to put into your souls and hearts during our meeting today.