Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 4 March 1922, Leipzig

78. Abstract Thoughts, Living Will

My dear friends!

I am able to speak to you again after a long time. Today I would like to say a few things that can complement yesterday's public lecture. One must try to recognize man as he is now. When a person dies here in the physical world, his body remains behind as a corpse. He is abandoned by his soul and spirit and handed over to the earth. The dead person is actually no longer a person, but only an image of a person. What is death on earth is a birth in the spiritual world. If, on the other hand, the human soul builds a body after conception, this means dying for the spiritual world. The soul dies for the spiritual world. But where does this soul corpse remain? It does not remain in the spiritual world, but is buried in the human body, in the brain. And what is this soul corpse? It is the abstract thoughts of the human being. The thoughts of man are not alive, they are dead.

This was not the case in the past. The human soul still took some of the life force of the thoughts with it into the physical world. That is where the possibility of seeing the spiritual worlds came from. This has only changed since the first third of the fifteenth century. It is necessary for humanity to learn to recognize that it carries the corpse of the soul around with it in its abstract thoughts. Anthroposophy should bring thoughts back to life.

Some people find that unpleasant. When someone comes to a lecture who has really focused his thinking on his cause, who only pursues abstract thoughts, he suddenly realizes that his thoughts are beginning to wriggle and crawl. Before, they were as still as a corpse being dissected. But now they start to come alive. And that makes people uncomfortable. They are unconsciously afraid of this life. That's where the nervousness, the anxiety of many people comes from. They unconsciously realize that they have a corpse in their mind, and that makes them anxious. And this anxiety will continue to increase as people continue to develop towards cleverness. You see, in a small child you can really experience that it only brings a corpse down with it from the spiritual world. If you observe a child, you will see that it has almost no living thoughts. It must first gradually awaken thoughts through its will, get thoughts into its hand.

Will is a completely different matter. The child has a lot of will. It cries, moves, struggles. But the will is what happens unconsciously. I only see the effects of the will, but not the will itself. When I make a movement with my will, my surroundings change. I enter into a different relationship with it. In order to recognize the will, I have to go out of myself into the world.

The will is only a germ, an embryo within us. It points beyond the gate of death to life after death.

Normally, we experience our body as - forgive the harsh expression - a lump. However, people will increasingly come to feel their organs individually, to become organ-conscious. In unconscious depths, man now has this organ consciousness. Sometimes this plays up into consciousness and makes people restless. He becomes angry. Many modern-day illnesses can be traced back to this unconscious knowledge of the individual organs. This lack of knowledge also has the effect that people feel torn apart after death. They do not have the opportunity to unite what the individual organs have given them. It can break one's heart to see such souls enter the spiritual world. Only a true knowledge of the nature of Christ can help. You have to allow the Christ impulse to flow into you. One must recognize that Christ has conquered death.

You must not only consider the “Ex deo nascimur”, but also the “In Christo morimur”. Theology only looks at life after death. It is not interested in getting to know a life before birth. They are there, and that is the main thing. And now they are only interested in what happens to people after death. They believe in eternal life out of egoism; they can listen to sermon after sermon, always addressing man's egoism. You have to consider the “Ex deo nascimur/ In Christo morimur/ Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”. That is what anthroposophy wants. That, my dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you today in addition.

(Some things that are out of context.)

When the human being sleeps, the ego and the astral body dissolve. We can see that the ego is a questioning spirit. It constantly asks questions of the physical and etheric body. If we now have the ego and the astral body in us again when we are awake, then it asks its questions through us. This was known in ancient times. It is immortalized in many myths.

If you observe the moment of waking spiritually, you realize that the ego and the astral body have the need to return to the physical body and the etheric body. But when you are awakened by throbbing, it is different. The throbbing first has an effect on the physical body. This effect is felt by the astral body and the ego. In a way, the ego becomes afraid that something could happen to its physical body. That is why it returns and the person awakens.

Great personalities of humanity have recognized the development of humanity. Let's take Goethe's Faust. Goethe places him in the time where abstract thinking takes its starting point. Faust himself feels unsatisfied by these abstract sciences. Although as a professor he has led his students around by the nose for ten years, he longs for the old way of looking. He has therefore surrendered to magic.

You can roughly calculate that Faust could have been a professor at the University of Wittenberg. And if you now look for a student of Faust, you will find Hamlet, who is described by the writer of Shakespeare's plays. After all, Hamlet studied in Wittenberg. Hamlet has now almost completely adopted abstract thinking. He has come so far that he sees the brain as a book. He is one of those who still stands there with a tablet in his hand and writes everything down, because:

What you have in black and white, you can carry home with confidence.

The spirit of the father appears to him, the spirit of the old way of seeing, of the old science.