Lessons for the Participants of Cognitive-Cultic Work 1906–1924

GA 265a — 11 November 1912, Berlin

What Is Chalk?

Notes from the estate, presumably by Gertrud von Tschirschky.

Today marks the beginning of a new period of work in which we have reunited after a long break to work together. This work of ours is twofold: firstly, to find the path to the spiritual worlds, that is, to find knowledge; and then secondly, to live with the world forces, in the principles by which the world is shaped, the co-forces.

Gaining knowledge is difficult. Let us take for example a very simple object, a piece of chalk, to understand what Maya is. The sentence could be coined that sounds so simple: to gain knowledge, one must seek out the relationships between events.

This can be explained by means of a small but characteristic feature of our time. A newspaper cutting arrived from Bern these days, containing an advertisement that a lecture would be given in Bern on “The dangers of spiritualism and Dr. Steiner's theosophy” in the same hall where my lectures have been held. If you approach it rationally, you can say all sorts of things in response to such a fact. For example, you can point out that our movement is young and could easily be misunderstood, and so on. You can also say that someone might be driven by the best of intentions when they feel compelled to draw attention to the dangers.

But the actual facts of the matter are as follows – and anyone who is unaware of them, and they cannot be known without being explained, will never be able to deduce them with the help of their intellect. So here is the series of events: I was in Frankfurt and was on the square in front of the hotel for some reason; the bellhop came up behind me and said I should come to the hotel as quickly as possible, they were telephoning for me; I said that there was still time for that until I came back anyway. Then a gentleman asked when he could speak to me, the hour was agreed, the gentleman came; there was a lot of talking now; what was most striking about his manner was his folly.

Here, where we are aware that we do not want to criticize, that sympathies and antipathies do not have a say, something like this can be said because it is true. The Lord was (... long hair – unfortunately I have forgotten this nuance G.v.T.) of great folly. Those of our sisters and brothers who know how we work will know that anyone who comes seeking help and explanations will receive both, regardless of the qualities they possess. But here we had one of those cases that really do occur only rarely and only when the good of the movement demands it: the gentleman had to be turned away energetically. He said that he had been following me for so long and so often, always wanting to talk to me, and now he wanted all kinds of help from me.

The first thing that came to life in this gentleman when he was rejected, of course, was wounded vanity, tremendous wounded vanity, which naturally led him to turn against our movement. What is happening now in Bern is the result of wounded vanity; the matter in Frankfurt is not that long ago.

You can see from this that the reasons for the current action lie in a series of events that one would never come to if one wanted to judge the events in Bern rationally and critically. It is not important today to explain; only facts should be told to awaken a feeling for how to approach the events of life.

The impulse that flowed down from the spiritual world for this hour today was to create an atmosphere for what is to happen in the work this winter, an atmosphere for approaching the events of life. Think of something that has already been mentioned, at least for some of the brothers and sisters: The enormous amount of fish sperm, of which so few achieve their goal of developing into a new creature; enormous amounts perish in the sea. Likewise, a cornfield; a tiny part of the new grains will become ears of corn again, all the others enter lower, non-living forms of existence, become flour, bread. One must really be able to feel this, this failure to achieve the assessed goal for the vast majority. But bread becomes food for higher living beings, which could not exist without it.

And what is chalk? In what was the element of the earth in primeval times, lower creatures lived, which secreted vast amounts of seed; little of this seed fulfilled its actual purpose, the quantities precipitated and over time became what we now have as chalk. Only because of the abundance of seed from these lower creatures does the earth owe what it now has as chalk substance. (Bones!)

Here too we should feel that our intellect cannot enlighten us. We should learn to feel the workings in the divine-spiritual. That it is precisely spiritual forces that need what apparently does not reach its goal, what apparently perishes, as an external expression, and whose meaning and purpose remain hidden from the human mind at first.

I have already related the following in the Architect's House. A daughter was born to a couple. The mother died that same day; the father learned that his ship had sunk at sea and that his fortune was lost; he was struck down. So the child was alone and poor at the earliest age. A benefactress took her in and bequeathed enough to her in her will to ensure that she had sufficient maintenance. When the girl was seventeen, the carer died. There was a technicality in the will, it was contested, and the girl was left with nothing. So, for the second time in her young life, she was robbed of the goods of fortune that had presented themselves to her. She had to hire herself out as a servant. She met a man who fell deeply in love with her. She returned his love and agreed to marry him in order to escape from this desperate situation. It turned out that the marriage was impossible because the times were different then and the man belonged to a different faith. But he did not want to let go of her, but persuaded his father to give him permission to be baptized. The father did not want to agree, but he was already old; they waited for his death, which occurred. While the man was traveling to see his father, the girl became ill, died and was buried. After that, the man returned to marry her. He was so attached to her that he wanted to give her corpse as a gift. He had the grave opened and it was recognized from the position of the body that the girl had been buried in a state of suspended animation.

So a completely crushed life! This is how it appears to the observer. But the fact of the matter was that the girl had not taken enough possession of her bodies in this life. So the apparent death could also take place. A strong soul, but one that, after previous incarnations, was now going through a life that was always and always again a crushed one. And the purpose of this crushed life was to help her to take hold of her covers much more powerfully in a later, third life than in the life before the crushed one. It is precisely in this crushing that the source of strength for the next life lies. This must be felt and understood, how - that is, in what way - forces physically express themselves in the divine-spiritual work.

Do not approach the events of world evolution with a human mind, but acquire a feeling, a mood that can be used to absorb knowledge about the true causes, the true reasons that give rise to external forms. Just as that girl underwent a crushed life in order to gain strength for later, so we have to look behind the seeds, the grains that do not achieve their actual purpose, for ruling and working spiritual forces that express themselves in matter precisely in this way. We have to develop an intuitive sense for the spiritual underpinnings of phenomena, to acquire a feeling for them...