Cultural Phenomena — Three Perspectives of Anthroposophy

GA 225 — 22 September 1923, Dornach

XI. The World of Dreams as a Transitional Current between the Physical-Natural World and the World of Moral Concepts

If we want to categorize what we can get to know as the stages of the path into the spiritual world into what is already known from ordinary life, it is important to be able to correctly assess the three states of consciousness in which a person already finds themselves in ordinary life. We have already described these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping. And we also know how a person actually only experiences true waking consciousness in their thinking, in their imagining, and how feeling already works in such a way that, although it appears different in its experiences than the world of dreams, in its overall constitution, in the way it relates to the person, it is the same as the world of dreams. We experience feelings in our ordinary consciousness in an equally indeterminate way to dreams, but not only in such an indeterminate way, but also in a context similar to that of dreams.

The dream strings image to image. It does not care about the connections in the outside world as it strings image to image. It has its own connections. It is basically the same with the world of feelings. And the person who, for ordinary consciousness, would have such an emotional world as he has a world of ideas would be a terribly sobering, terribly dry, icy person. In the world of ideas, that is, in full wakefulness, one must pay attention to what is commonly called logic. It would be impossible to get on in real life if one were to feel everything as one thinks it.

And then we have mentioned several times: the will emerges from the hidden depths of human existence. It can be imagined, but its actual nature, how it works and weaves in the human organism, remains as unknown or unconscious to the human being as the experiences of sleep itself. And it would also be extremely disturbing for the human being if he were to experience what the will actually does.

The will is in reality a process of combustion, a process of consumption. And to always perceive how one consumes one's own organism in the act of willing, and then having to replace what has been consumed again and again through nourishment or sleep, would, if it accompanied the entire waking life, not be a very comfortable process for ordinary consciousness.

Now, in a sense, we can compare the world of human feelings in a waking state, so to speak waking dreams, and the world of dreams in a state of drowsiness or half-sleep, in their images, more so that the human being does not initially perceive these images as I, but as something that is the outside world. The dreaming person experiences what is happening as dream images so strongly as an external world that he can sometimes perceive himself within these dream images.

What should interest us particularly about these dream images today is this: we live through ordinary life, one experience after another. The dream shakes these experiences up. It pays little attention to the way a person in an awake state has experiences in context. It is a poet that unfolds the strangest inclinations.

A philosopher told of himself that he often dreams that he has written a book that he has not actually written, but in the dream he believes that he has written the book, a book that is better than all his other books. But at the same time he dreams that the manuscript has been lost. He can't find it, he has misplaced it. And now he rushes from drawer to drawer, searching through everything in his dream, but he can't find the manuscript. He is overcome by an incredibly uncomfortable feeling that he has lost this manuscript of his very best book and may never find it again. He then wakes up to this unease. Of course, this is quite an experience, especially for the philosopher I mean, who has written many books. They have been published in such large numbers that once, when I was visiting this philosopher, where the philosopher's wife was also present, the wife told me: Yes, my husband writes so many books that one always competes with the other.

It was actually always rather practical in this philosopher's house, so that I once, when I was visiting this philosopher with a publisher, actually got a little annoyed because I wanted to discuss epistemological problems with him. Now I had dragged the publisher along, actually he had dragged himself along, and the philosopher immediately started: Can you tell me from your expertise whether a great many copies of this or that work of mine are available from antiquarians? – So there was a very practical sense in the philosopher's house. I don't want to disparage that, I am just telling it as something characteristic. Now, someone else might have dreamed something else, which would have colored the experiences in a fantastic way as well.

Everyone can know that the dream does not proceed in the same way as the external experience, but that other connections are created in the dream. But on the other hand, everyone can also know how the dream is intimately connected with what the human being actually is. It is indeed the case that many dreams are actually reflections of even the physical human interior, and one already weaves in dreams as in something that is intimately connected with one.

Now one gradually becomes really aware of how the dream arranges the experiences in its own way. If you keep this very clearly in mind, you will gradually come to know that you do live in this dreaming after all. Only in this dreaming you live in the times when you either just go out of the physical body and the etheric body or when you return to them. It is actually in these transitions between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking that the dream takes place. I have repeatedly given examples showing that the most important part of the dream takes place during waking and falling asleep. Among the characteristic examples, I have given this one – you remember it – in which a student dreams that two students are standing at the door of a lecture hall. One of them says something to the other that, after the thing called a comment, absolutely demands satisfaction. It comes to a duel. Everything is vividly dreamt, going out to the duel, first choosing seconds and so on, until the shooting begins. He still hears the bang, but it immediately turns into the blow that a chair, which he has knocked over at that moment, has done. So at that moment he wakes up. This fall of the chair triggered the whole dream. The dream thus fades at the moment of waking, it only appears to do so because it has its own time within it, not the time that it would last. Some dreams last so long according to their inner time that you don't sleep as long as you would have to sleep if the dream lasted the time it carries within itself. Nevertheless, a dream is intimately connected with what a person experiences inwardly, but experiences inwardly down to his physical body.

People in ancient times were well aware of such things, and for a certain kind of dream – you can read about it in the Bible yourself – the ancient Jews said: God has punished you in your kidneys. So they knew that a very specific kind of dream was connected with the function of the kidneys. On the other hand, you only need to read something like “The Seer of Prevorst” and you will find how people actually describe the damage to their organs in their dreams, people who are particularly predisposed to doing so, so that some diseased organ is symbolically visualized in powerful images, which can lead to the remedy being presented alongside this diseased organ. In ancient times this was even used to induce the patient himself, in a certain respect, to indicate his remedy from his own dream interpretation. And what was practiced in the authorized temple sleep must also be studied in this direction.

When we look at the whole relationship between dreams and external experiences, we have to say that dreams protest against the laws of nature. From waking to sleeping, we live by natural laws. Dreams pay no heed to these natural laws. In a sense, the dream turns its nose up at the laws of nature. And what is being researched as the laws of nature for the external physical world is not the lawfulness of the dream. The dream is a living protest against the laws of nature. If, on the one hand, you ask nature what is true, it answers in the laws of nature. If you ask the dream what is true, it does not answer in terms of natural laws. And the person who judges the course of a dream according to natural laws will say that the dream is lying. In this ordinary sense, it does lie. But this dream does come close to the spiritual and supersensible in man, even if the images of the dream belong to the subconscious, as one can say in the abstract, and one does not judge it correctly if one does not know that it comes close to the inner spiritual reality of the person.

Now, however, this is something that is difficult to admit in our time. One wants to abstract the dream. They want to judge it only by its fantastic nature. They do not want to see that in a dream we have something before us that is connected with the inner being of man. Is it not true that when a dream is connected with the inner being of man and protests against the laws of nature, it is a sign that the inner being of man itself is something that protests against the laws of nature.

Please understand that this is a weighty word, that when you get to the person, their inner being actually protests against the laws of nature. For what does that mean?

When today, the scientific way of thinking observes the laws of nature in a laboratory-like manner from what is outside in nature, then this scientific world view also approaches the human being and treats him as if the laws of nature were also continuing within him, in his inner being, or, to put it better, within his skin. But that is not the case at all. This inner being is much closer to the dream with its denial of natural laws than to the natural laws; the human inner being is such that it does not act and develop its activities according to natural laws. The dream, which in a certain sense is a reflection of this human inner being in its composition, is a testimony to this. And for those who understand this, it is simply the case that they have to say that it is actually absurd to believe that the same laws prevail within the heart and liver as externally in nature. Logic belongs to the external nature. The dream belongs to the inner being of man, and whoever calls the dream fantastic should also call the human inner being fantastic. He can feel that, because the way the human interior unfolds between birth and death here in earthly life, where an illness emerges from one corner and a sense of well-being from another, is much more similar to the realm of the 'I' than to external logic. But our present way of thinking completely lacks this way of approaching the human interior, because our present way of thinking is completely absorbed in what is observed in the outer nature or in the laboratory. One wants to find this in the human interior as well.

In this respect, it is really of great importance that we learn, for example, how the way in which science often deals with what plays a role in the physical aspect of human beings is treated today. We know that proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salts are essential to human life - in essence, of course. We know that. So what does science do? It analyzes the protein and finds so much oxygen, so much nitrogen, so much carbon in it, in percentage terms; it analyzes the fats, the carbohydrates, and so on. We now know how much of each is present. But you never learn from such an analysis what influence, for example, the potato has played in European culture. There is also little mention of this influence of potato food on European culture, because from this analysis, where you simply find how differently carbon, nitrogen and so on are distributed in one food and in another, you never find out why, for example, rye is preferentially digested by the forces of the lower digested by the forces of the lower abdomen, while the potato, on the other hand, requires forces up to the brain to digest it, so that when a person eats an excessive amount of potatoes, his brain has to be used to digest the potatoes, and so some of the brain power is lost for thinking.

It is precisely in such things that one notices how neither today's materialistic science nor the more theologically colored views come close to the truth. Science describes food in much the same way as if I wanted to describe a watch, and now I begin: the silver is mined in a silver mine; it is done in such and such a way. Then the silver is loaded up and shipped to the cities, and so on. But we stop at the watchmaker. We no longer look into his workshop. Then, perhaps, you describe the porcelain dial and how the porcelain is made. Again, they stop at the watchmaker's workshop. This is how today's science deals with food. It analyzes it. In doing so, it says something that actually says nothing about the importance of food in the human organism, because despite all the analysis, there is a big difference between enjoying the fruit of something, for example rye or wheat, and enjoying the tubers, as with potatoes.

Tubers fit into the human organism quite differently than fruits or seeds. So we can truly say that today's way of thinking no longer sees through material existence at all. Therefore, materialism is the world view that does not even know matter in its effects. Spiritual science must shine into it so that we can get to know matter. That is why the materialistically minded say: Anthroposophy is fantastically spiritual. And those who have theosophy or theology and want to stop at the abstracted spirit, which never comes to real work, where it never comes so far that it really shows how it intervenes as spirit in the material effects, they say that Anthroposophy is materialistic because it brings its insights to matter.

And so one is actually attacked from two fronts, both by those who treat everything ideally and abstractly and by those who treat everything materially. But those who treat everything ideally and abstractly do not get to know the spirit, and those who treat everything materially do not get to know matter. In this way, a way of thinking is developing more and more today that cannot reach people at all.

Now, however, something very strange has actually happened in our spiritual development in recent times. People can no longer help but admit at least the dark sides of spiritual life if they do not want to be completely stubborn. And it is a characteristic monument to the way in which people who are so completely immersed in science behave when they enter these dark areas of spiritual life, or something else that I will mention in a moment – but cannot deny.

A notable example of this is the book by Ludwig Staudenmaier: “Magic as an Experimental Science”. It is almost as if one were to say: “The nightingale as a machine”. But after all, this book could be written as something quite characteristic of our time.

So how does this man actually work? The strange thing about him is that his life has driven him to it, that the magical has been approached experimentally through himself. He had to start experimenting with himself one day, I would say, out of a dark destiny. After some of his experiences, he could no longer deny that, for example, there are writing mediums. You know that I don't recommend these things and always explain their dangers; but when there are writing mediums, as there are, something very strange happens, and one must very critically separate truth from error. Well, this writing of things that the person does not have in mind at the moment when he writes them, this mediumistic writing became an experimental problem for Staudenmaier, and he began to put the pencil to paper himself, and lo and behold, things came out that he had never thought of. He wrote the strangest things. Do you think it is also a surprise when someone who thinks entirely scientifically takes a pencil in his hand, makes himself the writing medium and now believes that it will not work. But now this pencil suddenly acquires power, guides the hand, writes down all kinds of things that amaze you. That happened to Staudenmaier.

And what surprised him most was that this pencil became moody – that's what people say – just as a dream becomes moody, writing completely different things than he had intended. It seems, you can tell from the context, that the pencil once exerted a compulsion on the hand: “You are a cabbage!” and to write similar nice things.

Now, these are things that the gentleman certainly did not think of himself! And after such things had accumulated, and the pencil had repeatedly written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked: Yes, who is it actually that is writing? – Now it answered: It is spirits who are writing. That was not true in his opinion, because ghosts do not exist for a scientifically minded person. What should he say now? He can't say that the spirits have lied to him, so he says: his subconscious is constantly lying. It's a terrible story, isn't it, when the subconscious suddenly comes to the conviction in the person himself that, for example, he is a cabbage and writes it down, so that, as they say in ordinary life, it is in black and white.

But he continued to behave as if spirits were speaking. So he asked them why they didn't tell the truth. They replied: 'Yes, that is our nature, we are just the kind of spirits who have to lie to you; it is in our character, we have to lie.

That was extremely characteristic. Now, however, we are entering a realm where things really get quite tricky, because, you see, if it turns out that the truth only sits up there and lies are constantly told down there, it naturally creates an uncomfortable situation. But if you are completely caught up in a natural scientific world view, then in such a case you cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is a liar inside you.

Nevertheless, Staudenmaier comes to the conclusion that objective spiritual beings never speak, but only the subconscious. You can put everything into such general terms.

But you see, it is characteristic that these spirits did not even try to guide Staudenmaier's hand in such a way that they might have written down a new mathematical proof for him or solved a scientific problem. That is actually the most characteristic thing, that they always said something different.

There were occasions when Staudenmaier was beside himself, and then a doctor friend would advise him to go hunting. Such instructions are common in medical advice. For example, getting married is sometimes a particularly popular piece of advice in medicine. In this case, the advice was to go hunting to get out of this crazy stuff, to distract himself, so to speak.

But lo and behold, even though he went hunting magpies, as he describes in detail, always looking out for magpies, all sorts of demonic figures peered down from the trees, not magpies. There sat on some branch such things, like something that was half a cat and half an elephant, turning up its nose at him or sticking out its tongue at him. And when he looked away from the tree into the grass, he saw not hares, but also all kinds of fantastic figures, who did their juggling with him.

So not only had the pen written down all sorts of stuff, but now the higher imagination was also stimulated in such a way that not magpies appeared, but demons, all sorts of ghostly creatures, so again a lie.

Actually, what he saw was like a dream, and it could have happened if his will had remained intact, that instead of a magpie, he would have shot some kind of scoundrel that was half cat and half elephant. If it had fallen down, it would have transformed itself, being half frog and half nightingale, with a devil's tail, because it would have transformed itself while falling.

In any case, we can say that this experimenter came close to a world very similar to the world of dreams, and that this world is also a protest against the whole natural-law context. For what would the natural-law context have been? Well, he would have taken his gun off his shoulder, shot a magpie, and there would have been a magpie down there. But none of that appeared, only what I have characterized to you: once again a protest against natural law, from the spiritual world of the night side, into which the man had pushed. And if the man had stopped at the subconscious, he should at least have said to himself: If all this is down there in the subconscious, then my subconscious protests against the laws of nature. - For what does this subconscious actually tell him? Yes, it conjures up all kinds of demons and the like, as I have described. That tells him something quite different from what he has imagined about himself. So he should at least conclude from this: If the world were only organized according to natural laws, then my inner self could not exist at all, then I could not exist as a human being, because when this inner self speaks, it speaks quite differently than in natural laws. So a completely different world belongs to the inner self of man than the one over which the laws of nature are spun, a world that protests in its coherence against the laws of nature.

That, after all, is the only interesting thing about this magical experimenter or experimenting magician, who has impressed so many people so extraordinarily. It is something that shows us how, in fact, man can come to perceive such a world in other ways as well, as the world of dreams, which otherwise more or less always occurs in life, is in its contexts.

And this leads to the realization, through a correct view of ordinary life, that simply because man is there, the ordinary world, interwoven with natural laws, is adjacent to another world that is not interwoven with natural laws.

If you look at these things correctly, you have to say to yourself: there is the world interwoven with natural laws, which we study. Bordering on this is another world that has nothing to do with natural laws; quite different laws prevail in it. So, by immersing oneself in a real way in the world of dreams, one arrives in a world where natural laws cease. The fact that the human being's ordinary consciousness initially perceives this world in a fantastic way is merely due to the fact that he does not have the ability to recognize the connections that confront him. He brings the fantasy with him. But that which lives and weaves there is precisely another sphere of the world, into which the human being plunges in his dreams.

This leads us directly to something else. If you talk to someone who is completely absorbed in the world view that is currently in vogue, they will say: I study the laws of falling by looking at a falling stone. I discover the laws of gravitation. Then I go out into the world and apply them to the stars as well. And then it is thought: Here is the earth, where I find the laws of nature, and there is the cosmos. I think, blackboard 10, the laws that I have found here on earth also apply to the Orion Nebula or to anything.

Now everyone knows that, for example, gravity decreases with the square of the distance, that it becomes weaker and weaker, that the light decreases, and I have already said: So the truth of our natural laws also decreases. What is true in relation to natural laws on our earth here is no longer true out there in the universe. That is only true up to a certain distance. But out there in space, outside a certain width, the same lawfulness begins that we encounter when we immerse ourselves in a dream. Therefore, people should realize that when they look out at the Orion Nebula, they should actually not think physically, using the experimental method, to understand the Orion Nebula, but rather begin to dream, because the Orion Nebula shows its lawfulness according to dreams.

One can say that people actually knew about such things at one time, and intuitions still remained for later times, especially with thinkers who were able to concentrate quite well.

One such naturalist, who did not live in the second half of the 19th century but in the first, was Johannes Müller, who was the teacher of Haeckel. He was a man who could truly concentrate at all times. He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. The fact that one can really live like that, concentrated in whatever one is doing, sometimes leads to more; in some respects, as I will mention in a moment, it may have downsides. Johannes Müller, for example, was once asked about something during a summer course he taught. He said, “That is something I only know during the winter lectures, not in the summer.” He was so focused on the material for his summer lectures that he freely admitted that he only knew the rest during the winter.

But this Johannes Müller, for example, once confessed the very interesting fact that he can really cut up corpses for a long time to come to something; he does not come to it, he does not get into what he actually wants to understand. But sometimes he succeeds in dreaming about what he has experimented on, and then he sees much deeper into the matter, then things open up for him. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century. Then someone could still allow himself such extravagances, even if he was a famous natural scientist.

So, man enters into a completely different world, into a completely different order of things, when he dreams. And on proper consideration, it must be assumed that actually, if one were to do as Johannes Müller did, one would not have to think about the Orion Nebula as one does in the observatories or in the astronomical institutions, but one would have to dream about it, then one would know more about it than if one thought about it. I would like to say that this is connected with the fact that in pastoral ages, when shepherds slept in the pasture at night, they actually dreamed about the stars, and they knew more than later people know. It is really true, it is so.

In short, whether we go into the depths of man and approach the world of dreams or whether we go out into the wide universe, we meet, as the ancients said, outside the zodiac a world of dreams.

And here we are at the point where we can understand what the Greeks meant when they used the term “Chaos”. I have read all kinds of explanations of Chaos, but I have always found them far from the truth. What did the Greeks mean when they spoke of Chaos? He meant the lawfulness that one gets a glimpse of when immersed in a dream, or that one must assume in the outermost circumference of this universe. This lawfulness, which is not the lawfulness of nature but something else, the Greeks attributed to chaos. Yes, they said, chaos begins where the lawfulness of nature can no longer be found, where a different lawfulness reigns. For the Greeks, the world was born out of chaos, that is, out of a context that was not yet natural law, but rather like a dream or, as it still is today, the worlds of the constellation of Orion, the hunting dog and so on. First, you enter a world that at least announces itself to man in the fantastic but vivid world of dream images.

But now it is the case that when the physical natural world lies here, we enter into a second current, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in dreams. But then we enter into a third current, which lies beyond the world of dreams and no longer has any direct relationship to the laws of nature. The world of dreams protests in its imagery against the laws of nature. In this third world, it would be quite nonsensical to say that it follows natural laws. It completely and boldly contradicts natural laws, because it also approaches people. While the dream still comes to light in the world of vivid images, this third world first comes to light through the voice of conscience in the moral world view.

When we have the world of nature on the one hand and the world of morality on the other, there is no transition. But the transition lies in the world of dreams or in the world that the experimenter has experienced in the field of magic, where things have told him something quite different from the connections of natural law.

Between the world interwoven with natural laws and the world from which our conscience speaks as it flows into us, lies the world of dreams for ordinary consciousness. But this leads directly to the fact – because this is at the same time the waking world, this the dream world, this the sleeping world – that this brings us to the idea that during sleep the gods actually speak to man of what is not natural but moral, what then remains for man as the voice of God in his inner being when he wakes up, as conscience.

In this way, the three worlds are connected, and two things can be understood: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against the natural context, and on the other hand, to what extent this world of dreams is a transition to a world whose reality remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, to the world from which moral views also come.

If one then finds one's way into this world, one finds there the further spiritual world, which can no longer be grasped in terms of natural laws, but in terms of spiritual laws, while in dreams natural laws mix colorfully with spiritual laws, spiritual laws with natural laws, because the dream world is a transitional current between the two worlds.

Thus we have illuminated from another side how man integrates himself into the three worlds.