The Human Soul in its Connection with Divine-Spiritual Individualities

GA 224 — 21 June 1923, Stuttgart

Our Thought Life in Sleep and Wakefulness and in the Afterlife

When we consider human beings as they are in their earthly existence, then without doubt the most significant aspect of their life expressions must appear to be their ability to think or imagine, their ability to reflect on the world, on their own actions, and so on. We are mistaken if we form a different judgment about the course of earthly life. Certainly, there are many things that lead us to say that the most valuable thing for human beings cannot lie in their thoughts. For example, human beings experience their feelings and emotions below the threshold of thought, and what human beings can feel about their own tasks, about their behavior toward their fellow human beings, and even about the world, is more valuable than their thinking. And when we look at moral existence and become attentive to the voice of conscience, we say to ourselves: This voice of conscience speaks from the depths of the soul, which cannot be reached by mere thinking. We are particularly led to make such a statement when we want to point out that even through the highest development of their intellectual life, as they can achieve it through training in ordinary earthly life, human beings cannot achieve in a moral sense what a pure, indeed, one might often say, a simple conscience impels. Nevertheless, we are mistaken if we say that because all these things are true—and they are true—thoughts are not the essence of earthly human life. For certainly, from depths far deeper than thoughts, the voice of conscience sounds, the feelings of compassion sound, and so on. But for human beings, these impulses that sound and live out of the depths of their souls only come into their own, only then do they become what actually elevates them to the human level, when they are permeated by thoughts. The voice of conscience also derives its value from the fact that it works up from the depths of the soul, but then lives out in the world of thoughts, and human beings can clothe in thoughts what the voice of conscience tells them. Without overestimating the life of thought, we must nevertheless say, if we want to surrender ourselves to an illusion-free human consciousness, that this life of thought is what makes human beings human. And in a certain sense, the German philosopher Hegel is right when he says: It is thinking that distinguishes humans from animals.

But if we now look at the whole range of thoughts that fill us throughout our entire earthly life, from waking up to falling asleep, and if we are honest in this observation, in this looking, then we will say to ourselves: The greatest part of our thoughts in our earthly life is in some way dependent on external influences, on sensory impressions, on experiences connected with the material processes of earthly existence. And our thoughts are intimately connected with earthly life, so that we associate the most valuable aspects of human life during our existence between birth and death with earthly life. But when we look at the whole of human life on earth, as we have done from certain points of view in the last lectures I have been privileged to give here, we cannot fail to notice that at least one third of our earthly existence is spent in a thoughtless state. When we look back on our earthly life with the ordinary aids of our earthly consciousness, we actually always only link the experiences of the day to the experiences of the day, leaving out, of course, the experiences of sleep, which remain in the unconscious. But in doing so, when we look back on our earthly life in the usual way, we leave at least one third of our earthly life out of our consideration. This is obvious, because this third, the third of our earthly life that we spend asleep, remains in the unconscious.

But you know from previous lectures I have given here that this activity we spend in unconscious sleep is not without experiences. Between falling asleep and waking up, the ego and the astral human being go through experiences that simply do not shine into consciousness. And if you look more closely, you will find that those unconscious forces that are at work between falling asleep and waking up also continue to live in the waking state. They continue to live there, one might say, a kind of sleep life. They work in our entire will activity, which we are no more aware of in our ordinary consciousness than we are of the states of sleep. They continue to work in a large part of our emotional life, which forms a kind of dream existence. Precisely when we look at what comes out of our deepest being, out of our fundamental nature, we must also look at something unconscious during our waking life. And then, through spiritual scientific observation, we come to the conclusion that what is effective in the human being between falling asleep and waking up continues to work in the waking state, continues to work as the I and the astral human being, but that these do not enter the sphere of ordinary consciousness, but only appear in their effects, in the effects of the will, in the effects of the emotions. This gives what is actually present in full waking consciousness, the life of thought, a special character. And it is precisely this special character that becomes understandable to us when we consider the existence that human beings do not spend on earth, but between death and a new birth.

When a person passes through the gate of death, they go through states that I have often described to you, which are also recorded in our literature, and which you are familiar with, at least from certain sources. If we examine precisely and exactly to which individual members of the human being our thinking and our imagining actually adhere, we come to the conclusion that we need the physical body for earthly thought formation. The physical body is really what must be set in motion when human beings have thoughts as earthly human beings. Furthermore, in order to achieve this goal, to have thoughts, the etheric body must also be set in motion. But these are precisely the two members of human nature that, between falling asleep and waking up, remain lying in bed, unconscious, as we perceive it. However, if we attain a certain development of consciousness, a certain training of our soul, which then enables us to see physical things from a spiritual point of view, we come to realize that human beings think all the time while they sleep. Human beings never cease thinking during their earthly life, if we consider the whole human being.

When we wake up in the morning and return to our physical and etheric bodies, our ordinary consciousness is very quickly pushed into these bodies, and this ordinary consciousness only becomes aware that external things then begin to make an impression, that we then have sensory perceptions which we process mentally, that we have sensory perceptions of the external objects present. But when a person becomes much more conscious of immersing themselves in their physical and etheric bodies, then upon waking they encounter the thinking that has been going on continuously within them between falling asleep and waking up. They were just not there with their ego and astral body. They think, that is, the physical body and the etheric body are in a continuous thought activity between falling asleep and waking up, but the person with their ego and astral body is outside this thought activity, they do not participate in it and believe that it does not exist. They are in a state of great self-deception about themselves. And since what is beautifully and harmoniously integrated into the whole nature of human beings, indeed into the whole nature of beings, can be recognized particularly well when it is torn out of harmony and appears abnormally, human beings can also come to the conclusion from external experiences, when these arise in the context of the world, that they not only think between falling asleep and waking up, but that they even think more intelligently between falling asleep and waking up when they are not present than when they are present. For when we survey the whole situation, we come to the, I might say, depressing self-admission that our etheric body thinks worse when we, following the ego and the astral body, are stuck in it with our normal consciousness than when we are not stuck in it. We spoil the thoughts that take place in our etheric body by being stuck in it with our ordinary consciousness.

Therefore, those who have insight into these things can confirm stories such as the following: Once there were two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing about arithmetic—I must add—knew nothing at all about arithmetic. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we all know from experience that when it comes to certain parts of mathematics, you have to sweat a little over the problems. Philology is usually easier. And so it was with these two students who, as is often the case with students, shared a room and also slept together, so that when they had finished preparing for their exams one evening, the philology student was very pleased with himself, but the mathematics student was not at all, because he could not solve a problem that he was supposed to solve for a written assignment. He went to bed feeling extremely dissatisfied, and a strange thing happened: at a certain hour, the philology student woke up and saw the math student get up, go to his desk, and continue brooding, writing for a long time, and then go back to bed and sleep. The next day, when both got up, the math student said, “We didn't skip class yesterday, did we? I have a terrible hangover today.” The other replied, “That's no surprise. If you get up at three in the morning and spend hours doing math, you're going to have a foggy head the next morning.” The first student said, “I didn't get up!” He knew absolutely nothing about getting up. Now they looked, and lo and behold, he had solved his problem, but he knew nothing about it. Such things are by no means mere fairy tales. I have chosen an example from literature so that it can be verified. I could tell you many similar stories. I am not concerned with this individual case, but rather with the fact that this is indeed a reality: when consciousness is not present—and I emphasize that the person concerned knew nothing about it—the physical body and etheric body are, in a sense, acted upon by external impulses, and the etheric body works alone in the physical body to continue the task.

Yes, I already know what is in the hearts of some people; I know that some would very much like it if this happened quite often. But it is not so easy for the younger generation. In this case, I and the astral body worked only through external impulses, and when the etheric body is able to work alone in the physical body, it often proves to be even more ingenious than what is often achieved when the ego and astral body are present. As I said, this is only to illustrate the fact that human beings have thoughts throughout the night, that is, the physical body and the etheric body of human beings, and are not present with their ego and astral body. For thoughts are formed directly from the outer world through the mediation of the etheric body, and then the physical body is called upon to help cherish the thoughts as a physical human being on earth.

We must therefore find the life of thought to be completely bound to the physical body and the etheric body. This is not the case with the life of feeling and the life of the will. It is only a superstition of today's official science that the life of feeling and the life of will are dependent on the physical and etheric bodies in the same way as the life of thought. I have spoken about this often, and I do not wish to dwell on it today, but only to refer to the manifold considerations I have presented to many of you.

Now, in their present life on earth, human beings are not able to follow what their ego and astral body experience when they are separated from the etheric and physical bodies and take with them from ordinary life only their will and a part of their feelings. For this experience between falling asleep and waking up actually takes place in a completely different world, in a spiritual world, in a world where the environment is not the natural realm, the mineral realm, or the plant realm, but where the environment is the higher hierarchies, where the environment is a world of spiritual beings and spiritual events. But insofar as human beings dwell in earthly life, it is certainly true that they are not yet sufficiently developed to follow everything they experience with their ego and astral body from falling asleep to waking up into their conscious and self-conscious awareness. It remains unconscious, but is no less alive than the conscious. It is experienced, it is something that, after it has been experienced, belongs to the inner content of the human being. We also wake up every morning as changed as we have been changed by the night. We do not wake up merely in the state we were in when we went to sleep the night before, but we wake up in the state that our sleep life has made us.

When we pass through the gate of death, we lay down our physical and etheric bodies. And accordingly, the experience is such that in the first few days after passing through the gate of death — the laying down of the etheric body takes only a few days — the human being feels as if his thought life is being absorbed by the world. He has only a fleeting glimpse of his earthly life. It is as if he sees his earthly life as his world in living images. The past earthly life stands before the soul as if with a blow when the soul is completely freed from the physical body and the etheric body, when the passage through the gate of death has taken place. But this process, this transition, continues for several days, so that after the physical body has been laid aside, the etheric body slowly dissolves into the general world ether. During this time, there is the impression that there is first a living, sharply contoured overview of earthly life. Then it becomes weaker and weaker, but at the same time more cosmic, until finally, after a few days, it melts away from the human being.

But with this, everything that is most valuable in earthly life departs from the human being in these few days. Everything we think about the things of the world, everything we think about our entire earthly environment, everything that fills our ordinary consciousness melts away from us, melts away within a few days. And to the same extent that this content of earthly life melts away, to the same extent that which the human being has always unconsciously experienced in the sleeping state emerges. Consciousness now spreads over this. It begins to become conscious. If we had no experiences during sleep, our life as conscious life would come to an end three or four days after death. For what we consider to be our most valuable possessions during our earthly life melt away, and out of this darkening, fading consciousness emerges what we have always experienced in the sleeping state, what has remained unconscious.

Now, the peculiarity of what we experience in the sleeping state is that, for sleeping, the world runs backwards. Whether sleeping is long or short when we fall asleep does not matter, because the time relations are completely different for the other state of consciousness. So whether you sleep for a long night or a few minutes, the characteristic I give is the same for both types of sleep. When a person measures the time between falling asleep and waking up, they relive what they experienced in the physical world between the last time they woke up and the time they fell asleep. They relive this in a different form, and they experience it as follows: While in our daytime consciousness we experience life more with physical nuances and with feelings about the physical nuances, the sequence of events from beginning to end, each individual event or circumstance as they follow one another, in physical intellectual nuances, in sleep we experience all this again, but with moral nuances. This is where moral and religious impulses live, where we experience things in such a way that we evaluate each event according to how valuable or worthless it makes us as human beings. We could not indulge in any illusions about this if we were consciously going through it, about what significance it has whether we have accomplished this or that, because we evaluate the events of the day in relation to our humanity.

What applies to the human order on earth is that natural science has good reason to say that in the world there is only causality, only causation, only the justification of the subsequent from the preceding, because human beings in their waking life see only this current, perceive only this current. But there is also another current in reality, only it remains unconscious to humans in their earthly consciousness. However, humans experience this moral world order every night between falling asleep and waking up. There we evaluate things morally, especially in relation to our own human value. And we do this every night, or rather every time between falling asleep and waking up, for the previous waking period. And when we have passed through the gate of death, we go backwards through the last night, the night before last, the night before that, until the first night in which we became conscious for the first time after birth, about one third of our earthly life, because we have slept through one third of our earthly life. Before us lies the sunken physical-causal world, and before us has risen that which gods and spirits think, feel, and will about this world. But we are still connected to the coloring, the hue that earthly life has given to all of this, because we must go through it in the form in which we lived it during our earthly life. We need about a third of this time to live through this backward journey, which then proceeds as I have described, for example, in my “Theosophy,” where I described the soul land, the soul world.

Before we enter a world that is purely spiritual, we must first live through everything that we have unconsciously experienced on earth in our sleep states. In this way, we train our consciousness for the actual spiritual experience between death and a new birth. And at the same time, this backward experience of earthly life is a liberation from earthly life. We do not become free in our consciousness until we have freed ourselves through this backward experience, so that this consciousness can move among the spirits of the higher worlds in a manner entirely appropriate to it. Then we have arrived back at the starting point of our life for the higher world. And then the rest of our life between death and a new birth proceeds in such a way that it is a purely spiritual experience. Just as we live here among physical beings and physical events, we then live in the spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual events, among those spiritual beings and their deeds who never descend to earth, among those beings who descend to earth as human beings, who have passed through the gate of death before us, or who follow us. We meet again with all the people with whom we had fellowship during our earthly life. And this fellowship is indeed a very extensive one. For by living through the life of sleep, everything that we only touched upon with people during our earthly life is also included in this fellowship. The fact that we are already in the spiritual world in every state of sleep, but still experience earthly events in reverse as earthly human beings, is precisely what distinguishes this nightly earthly experience of human beings from what they go through when they have passed through the gate of death.

First of all, we must admit that what we recognize as the content of our consciousness in earthly life melts away from us in the course of a few days. That which we do not even notice in the course of earthly life because it is submerged in the unconsciousness of sleep, emerges afterwards when we really live through it—yes, really live through it. Namely, in those earthly states of sleep, we live through only the waking events in a pictorial way, living backwards with our ego and astral body. As we pass through the gate of death, we submerge into the spiritual substance just as we submerge into material substance when we become earthly human beings. One could say that just as we receive a physical and an etheric body when we become earthly human beings, so we receive a higher essence as an outer covering, a spiritual covering, when we pass through the gate of death. But in doing so, we then actually experience what we only experience figuratively here in states of sleep. This is real, actual experience, just as real as the earthly life spent in the physical body is real earthly life. And only to this real experience, which is a repetition in reality of the pictorial experience of every state of sleep, only to this do those experiences follow which we undergo in the further course of our life between death and a new birth.

Then follows the time between death and a new birth, in which we have, so to speak, laid down our entire earthly existence and, as I have already explained to you, prepare for the next earthly life by forming, in union with the beings of the spiritual world, the spiritual germ of our next earthly life, above all of our next physical body. Then there comes a time when the human being again turns more toward earthly life. After the human being has lived for a long time between death and a new birth among spiritual beings and spiritual facts, it is like—of course on a completely different level, but I would like to make it clear by means of a comparison—the state of a person who feels tired and wants to fall asleep. The human being feels how the consciousness that exists in the spirit becomes weaker, how he can no longer work with the beings of the higher world, and his consciousness again turns to an interest in a new earthly life. Just as we sink into sleep every day, where our consciousness becomes completely unconscious, so we sink, in a sense, into pure spiritual consciousness, which fills most of the time between death and a new birth, but now not into unconsciousness, but into a fulfillment of interest in earthly life, now seen from the other side, from the side of the spiritual world, into an interest in earthly life. This interest in earthly life arises many years, many centuries earlier, before we descend into earthly life. We already gain an interest in our coming earthly life when not only our grandfather lives on earth, but also a distant ancestor who lived many generations before us, from whom we are descended. The interest we have had for so long between death and a new birth in the purely spiritual world is transformed into an interest in a succession of generations. At the end of this succession of generations, we ourselves are born. From the spiritual world, we follow our ancestors through long periods of time, at the end of which stand our own parents. In this way, we grow into our ancestry from the spiritual world.

These things will one day pass into the general consciousness of humanity, and only then will we see to what limited extent what is today repeatedly discussed by a science that is correct but extremely limited applies: heredity. Physical heredity can only become clear to human beings when they know what part is played in physical hereditary formations by those forces with which they are already involved in their entire ancestral line from the spiritual world. When we point out here, with our physically limited science, how we have this or that characteristic of our great-great-grandfather, we must not forget how, even when this great-great-grandfather was alive, we were interested from the spiritual world in what our great-great-grandfather was like, how we grow into what then develops outwardly in the characteristics from generation to generation. We grow into it from the spiritual world.

These things will also gain practical significance later on, when anthroposophy becomes more integrated into the civilization of humanity as a whole. One cannot even begin to measure how much despondency and lack of energy in the soul today comes in a semi-conscious, unconscious way from thoughts about heredity, because science in particular can only speak about these hereditary relationships in a completely inadequate way. But these things have already passed into art, have passed into general human thinking.

Once human beings become thoroughly aware that they are connected not only to the physical form of their ancestors, but also to the development of their own souls, which follow the entire development of their ancestors from the spiritual world and contribute to it, then this awareness will become real within them. Then energy and courage will flow from the spirit into the souls of many people who, because of their present way of thinking, are filled with discouragement and lack of energy. For it is of the least value that we know this or that about the spiritual world in theory. Most of the time we even clothe our thoughts about the spiritual world in physical forms. It is not important that we form theoretical thoughts about the spiritual world. Certainly, we must first form these thoughts so that they enter our mind and our will, but the essential thing is that they can then live in our mind and in our feelings.

To illustrate this, I would like to say the following. Due to the circumstances I recently described in Dornach, the anthroposophical movement went hand in hand with the so-called theosophical movement for a time. It never adopted the teachings of the theosophical movement, but only found its audience within the Theosophical Society. But there are also teachings that are known as belonging to the theosophical movement. Superficial people confuse theosophy with anthroposophy. But even though the number of these superficial people is very large, the great, profound difference must be clear to you. I would like to characterize this profound difference with a few remarks. Try to follow closely how theosophical teachings actually work. They also speak of the members of human nature, members of the human being, and even use the same names for the lower members: physical body, etheric body, astral body. But then, when you look at the descriptions, you will find that the physical body is the dense body, then comes the etheric body, something thinner, but still a kind of mist, then comes the astral body, even thinner, a thinner mist, and then you have to climb terribly high, but it only becomes a thinner and thinner mist. Look at how little this literature deals with what is expected of even beginners in anthroposophical literature, I would say, not to imagine the etheric body as something thinner, but as something opposite to the physical body. Just as the physical body fills space, the etheric body takes something away. Physical matter fills space, etheric substance sucks space out. There is nothing of the kind that one always enters thinner mists, but rather one really embarks on the path to spiritual contemplation. This even disturbs many people, because they have nice ways of connecting to the physical world in these increasingly thin mists; one can imagine the whole thing through physical images, so that one can form entire systems, entire worldviews in this theosophical way.

When a person passes through the gate of death, I told you, their thoughts melt away within a few days. But this theosophy melts away within a few hours; it is among the first things to be forgotten. The peculiar thing is that those thoughts that originate from spiritualism are not even effective in the very first moments after death; human beings cannot even carry them through the gate of death. The thoughts that human beings form from spiritualistic experiments are the most materialistic thoughts. This is proven by the fact that they are not carried beyond death at all. For while spiritualists believe that thoughts from a spiritual world are brought to them through mediums, the truth is that all thoughts about spiritualism do not even go beyond death. So strong are the illusions to which people give themselves over when they want to form views about the spiritual world in some way.

The point is not that we merely think about the spiritual world—we must first think about it so that the content of the spiritual world can enter the soul at all—but the point is that these thoughts prove to be creatively alive. Ordinary physical earthly thoughts are abstract thoughts. Most scientific thoughts are entirely abstract thoughts that do nothing in human nature, any more than mirror images can do anything. These thoughts are only images. If you look in the mirror at the same time as someone else and receive a slap in the face, you will not attribute the slap to any of the mirror images, but to the real person standing next to you. Thoughts are just like mirror images: they do nothing, they do not actually provide any impetus. It is only the moral intuitions in thoughts that provide the impetus. And so it is that we must start from thoughts, but that thoughts about the spiritual world must act as realities act, not as thoughts.

Only then do we enter into the real anthroposophical view when we perceive thoughts as realities and also experience them as realities. This is also where we encounter the objection that is often raised. Superficial people also say: This whole anthroposophical worldview can also be based on imagination; human beings are subject to self-suggestion. As an example, it is said that people are sometimes so sensitive that the mere thought of drinking lemonade fills them with the sensation that one might have when actually drinking lemonade. It is true that there are people who are so sensitive that they only have to think of lemonade and they have the taste of lemonade in their mouths. If this is raised as an objection, it is correct, but let someone say whether they have quenched their thirst by merely thinking about lemonade! They have not done so. Mere thoughts do not become reality. However, as long as anthroposophy remains merely a thought, it is similar to what one experiences with an imagined lemonade. But it does not need to remain so, because it is drawn from spiritual reality. It does not merely act like a thought, but acts like the external reality of substances acts on the physical body. It permeates and pulsates through the will and emotional life of human beings. It becomes reality in human beings. That is what matters.

Ultimately, there is nothing special about having anthroposophy as a theory. It must become life. But it can become life especially in this respect, that it makes our souls energetic, resilient, courageous; that in the moment when we stand in concern for physical earthly life, in deepest sorrow and deepest misery, we can be filled with inner joy, inner comfort, inner energy by looking up to a spiritual world. Then anthroposophy becomes like a living being, then it becomes something that walks among us as a living being. But then it has actually become among us what it was meant to be, and then it permeates all our activities. And then it leads us to truly penetrate this world into which we have been placed on earth for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy then leads to a real knowledge of human beings. For if one simply regards the human being in such a way that, after he has died, one disregards what has now passed through the gate of death and considers only what remains as the physical body, anatomically, by dissecting the corpse, physiologically, one learns very little about the human being. For then everything about the human being becomes more or less indifferent, or rather, equally indifferent: the blood cell becomes strongly equivalent to the nerve cell. Certainly, one distinguishes between them — I do not want to talk nonsense — but one does not distinguish between them in terms of their essence. In terms of essence, one can only distinguish them if one knows the relationship of this elementary cell being to the spiritual. Now, in the case of the nerve cell, and indeed in every nerve particle, what comes from the spirit finds, I would say, its earthly home in the nerve being. When we step out of the spiritual world and become earth citizens again, we enter our physical body through the processes you are familiar with. What serves us as we descend into the physical world is everything that is connected with our nervous system. We sit down, as it were, into our nervous system when we descend from the spiritual world. And the peculiarity of this nervous human being, of every single nerve cell, of every nerve particle, consists in the fact that the spiritual fills this nervous substance in such a way that within the nervous human being, in its essence, there is what one might call spirit condensed into matter. It is not quite like that, but rather that in earthly human beings there is a constant exchange between nerve matter and blood matter. But the exchange is such that within the nerve matter, the actual blood matter is not tolerated, it is always thrown out, so that we have something in the nerve matter that is impermeable to earthly spirituality throughout our entire earthly life.

We come to earth, become nervous beings, and thereby say: We are heavenly sprouts. Insofar as we are nervous beings, we are heavenly sprouts, and we establish ourselves spiritually there, remaining heavenly sprouts insofar as we are nervous beings. In a sense, the spirituality that we were before has become rigid. And it attaches itself to the rest, which is not the nervous human being, which is, in the extreme, the blood human being. This is attached; it is different matter. It is matter that is in constant, intimate interaction with the spirit, that is constantly bubbling with the spirit. While the spirit is frozen in the nerve body, it is constantly being recreated in the blood body; this is where the actual earthly metamorphosis takes place. These two human beings are linked together, but they are completely different from each other, just as positive and negative electricity are different from each other. We carry such polarity within us in relation to the nature of our nerve body and blood body. The other organs are metamorphosed organs made of blood and nerves.

It is something completely different whether something is happening in our blood process—which is then earthly—or whether something is happening in our nerve process. We are not aware of this because the substance of the spirit is so frozen that everything is reflected back. These are our thoughts that are reflected back. But we carry this duality within us, that we are constantly heavenly descendants and earthly seeds. Heavenly descendants and earthly seeds—both are polar opposites—work together.

Now, allow me to use a comparison. You have two opposite states. Imagine a scale with the right and left beams held in the hypomochlion: you have equilibrium when the weight on one side is equal to the weight on the other. Whenever you increase the weight on one side of the scale, you must also increase it on the other side so that the beam remains horizontal. But there is one point that is not affected by this: the point where the beam is suspended. You can move the scale around anywhere as long as you hold it at the point where the beam is supported. You can see everywhere how the left side depends on the right and vice versa, but this suspension point doesn't care about that at all. Everything is in balance, and whatever happens on the two scales is completely independent of what is happening at that one point on the scale. If you are skilled enough, you can make a movement like this, or you can make a movement like this with the suspension point: this has nothing to do with what is happening on the scale, on the right and left sides of the balance beam. It is the same with human beings, only there is no suspension point, but a state of equilibrium between what they are as nervous beings and what they become on earth. These two things are related to each other in a way that can be investigated. In a person who has strong thoughts on the one hand, these are expressed in a strong decision of the will. If a person has strong muscles, they also have different thoughts about their will. But between these two there is a state of equilibrium. This state of equilibrium does not lie in the head as the representative of the nervous human being, nor in the limbs as the representative of the blood human being. It lies between them, it is something like a hypomochlion, which is the state of equilibrium between the two.

And what does this equilibrium mean for human beings? If the scales moved independently, they would be able to move around their point of equilibrium without being affected by whether the scales were loaded or not. Since human beings have such a state of equilibrium, they also move as earthly human beings quite independently of what natural science finds to be the causality of the will, the lack of freedom, the causation of the impulses of the will. As true as it is that there is a lawfulness between the right and left beams of the scales, so true is everything that natural science says about the cause of a decision of the will. But the will itself lies in the hypomochlion, in the position of equilibrium. One must therefore first recognize the real essence of man before one can judge whether man is a free being or not. However, this explanation only becomes clear when one understands the relationship of the spirit, on the one hand, to positive matter and, on the other hand, to negative matter, that is, the positive and negative relationships of the human being to matter. Then one finds the region between the two where the human being is realized as a free being. Then one looks into that in which human beings stand out both from causality and from spiritual determination. In ancient times, there was spiritual determination, from which philosophy claimed that human beings must be determined everywhere by the spirit; in more recent times, there has been natural causality. Just as the determinists splashed about in the nervous human being and did not know that something else, something opposite, always brings about a balance, so today's human beings move within natural causality. Both find the lack of freedom in human beings. But freedom lies within.

So it is a matter of our really being able to understand the physical world precisely because we can correctly grasp the relationship of this physical world to the spiritual world. It is not enough to say that the physical world is based on a spiritual world. At best, this leads to the trivial idea that there is the physical human being, and somewhere there floats a spiritual archetype. You cannot arrive at a conception of the physical human being. You can only understand the physical human being in such a way that the spiritual world stands in a completely different relationship to one half of the human being than to the other half, and that between them there is a point of equilibrium untouched by either, which constitutes human freedom.

Basically, an inner delight should arise in the soul—I am talking again about what is brought about by thoughts that are drawn out of the spiritual realm with all their vitality—an inner delight should arise in the soul when it can say to itself: It is like scales falling from one's eyes when one can say to oneself that human beings are free, and when one can look at the reasons for this freedom. As long as there are only people who, with ingenious cleverness — I do not deny this to anthroposophists — understand anthroposophy and profess it as a way of thinking, anthroposophy will not yet be alive. At the moment when, in the face of particularly important insights, souls are filled with delight and become joyfully excited by this or that insight, only then, when such people feel themselves to be anthroposophists, does the anthroposophical movement come into being. It actually arises as an anthroposophical movement in the whole human being. Then it also finds its equilibrium.

Now, my dear friends, I would like to conclude this lecture by leaving you with the question: How far can we already be inwardly inspired and joyfully enlightened by anthroposophical ideas? — Then think about the beginnings of the anthroposophical movement from this point of view!