11. What did the Goetheanum want and what is the Purpose of Anthroposophy?

GA 277d — 5 April 1923, Dornach

Dear attendees, the terrible fire disaster of last December night destroyed an outer shell of anthroposophical endeavor. This event, which is so painful for many who have grown fond of this building – the Goetheanum in Dornach – may perhaps give me cause to address these reflections first to the Goetheanum in Dornach today. I have been privileged to give many reflections of this kind here from this place, and today's reflection, too, is only intended to be given in the same style as the others, and only the connection is to be made to the Goetheanum. This Goetheanum has certainly had many people who, out of an insight into the will that wanted to emanate from this Goetheanum, greatly revered and loved this Goetheanum. But one may say that the vast majority of visitors, the numerous visitors who have been there over the years, could not make anything special out of this Goetheanum. There were many people who were annoyed by the very name Goetheanum. And then there were many who looked at the forms of this overall structure, composed of two domed buildings, and found them to be simply peculiar, perhaps merely the expression of a fantastic aspiration. There were then people who, on one or other of these grounds, believed that all kinds of spookish, perhaps spiritistic, goings-on took place in the Goetheanum, that it had been built to represent some kind of unclear, hazy mysticism, and perhaps even, as some put it, to serve the most blind superstition and so on, and so on.

And yet one might be amazed at how far what is believed in the present day about this or that can be from the actual fact. Because the Goetheanum has certainly not served any of the above. And if there are those today who fight against all these more or less backward or superstitious tendencies, those who want what was really wanted in the sense of building the Goetheanum, they certainly belong to these opponents. But I do not want to speak of the negative today; I want to speak of what the Goetheanum wanted and what Anthroposophy, for which it was intended to be a place, actually wants for present-day humanity.

The fact that the name Goetheanum was chosen over time was basically in line with the heartfelt desire of a number of admirers of the Goetheanum and Anthroposophy. The name of one of the figures in my mystery dramas, Johannes Thomasius (not John the Evangelist, but a character in my mystery dramas) was the first name chosen for this building on the hill at Dornach. It was accordingly named the Johannesbau.

Of course, this in particular gave rise to many misunderstandings, as is easy to understand, and I have therefore had to emphasize again and again that for me this Dornach building is a Goetheanum. Why? I can say that for more than 40 years I have been occupied with that which is based on Goethe's knowledge, art and world view. And anyone who delves into Goethe's striving for knowledge, into Goethe's art, into Goethe's striving for a worldview with an open mind, anyone who immerses themselves in it, will not only be stimulated to look at what Goethe wanted externally, but Goethe works when one really engages with him and with the universality of his striving. One can imbue one's soul with what he wanted, as with a spiritual lifeblood. And from this imbued experience of what one might call Goetheanism, I am convinced that it was wanted by Goethe in accordance with his time for certain parts of human perception, from this experience of what one might call Goetheanism, Anthroposophy has arisen.

Of course, anyone who takes Goethe's world view, Goethe's artistic intention and looks at it from the outside will not be able to extract from Goethe, with any kind of logic or, let us say, with any kind of ordinary artistic taste, what is contained in Anthroposophy. But there is, I would say, a logic of thought, and there is a logic of life. Those who make the logic of life their own can immerse themselves in something like that which Goethe revealed to the world, so that it comes to life in them, and continues to grow and develop. And in this sense of a living logic, I feel how Anthroposophy emerges from Goetheanism without contradiction, however little one admits it today. And because anthroposophy basically owes its origin to Goethe, it was a natural emotional need to call the place where anthroposophy, the descendant of Goethe's world view, so to speak, was cultivated, the Goetheanum.

This is not meant to be a silly claim to represent what Goetheanism is with any kind of perfection, but rather, I would like to say, this Goetheanum wanted to be a kind of place of homage for what Goethe gave to the world. It should not serve to represent Goethe's way of thinking for the sake of prestige, but rather it should be an expression of gratitude for what can be obtained from Goethe's world striving. And those who feel that this naming is in line with the expression of a feeling of gratitude will probably no longer be annoyed by the name.

But if I am to go further – my dear audience – and show you what the Goetheanum was intended for, then I must continue today the reflections that I have often been privileged to make in this hall and say what anthroposophy is intended for. Anthroposophy is indeed intended to find the answer, as far as it can be found by man, to the highest questions of human existence, to those questions that are related to human destiny and human dignity in the highest sense of the word. If a person does not numb their own soul life, then the question of the soul's eternity arises again and again. Then the question arises: Is the human soul a free or a non-free being? Then the question arises: To what extent does the human soul rest and work in that which can be called a divine world order?

Our present-day science, which has achieved such unspeakably great things for the external fields of life, has become rather timid about these questions, which are often called the last questions of existence, because this outer science wants to real, true science only that which can be perceived by the senses, which can be combined by human intellectual activity from sensory perceptions, and it rejects that which goes beyond the sensual. But in doing so, it also rejects any answer to the deeper questions of human existence, as just characterized. For without an entry of knowledge into the supersensible realm, man cannot even dare to attempt to approach a humanly possible answer to this question.

Anthroposophy, however, does not want to give the answers to these questions in a mere doctrine, to the extent that this is possible for man. Nor does anthroposophy want to give the answers to these questions through an unclear mysticism, but anthroposophy wants to penetrate as far as possible into these answers in the same way as today's sciences actually strive. The only thing is that anthroposophy is clear about the fact that what man calls knowledge still has to be grasped in a completely different way than it is often done today, especially by the most authoritative authorities, if one wants to see these questions in the right light at all.

I would like to start from a parable-like observation, but one that is supposed to be more than a mere parable. You see, my dear audience, every soul that contemplates the world, without thinking that it can gain special insights into the answers to the riddles of the world, every soul stands, perhaps only in amazement and admiration, before the images of that muffled world that we call the world of dreams. I start from the world of dreams, certainly not in order to mystically extract something from this world of dreams, but to illustrate how anthroposophy thinks about that which must become knowledge for humanity if the characterized questions are to be approached.

Imagine the manifold, colorful dream world before the sleeping soul. Imagine how, on the one hand, the content of the dream is a reflection of what we know well from the world we live in during the waking hours. But one should also imagine the soul, in which the dream world floats and envelops the soul in a freely moving way, transforming it, becoming more fantastic. And anyone who has an open mind, anyone who has a healthy mind and, above all, a healthy will in the world, will have no choice but to say to themselves: We can never recognize the reality value of the dream world during the dream itself.

We could, I would say, dream our whole life long, then we would simply, as we do in the dream experience, consider the dream content to be our reality. We would believe that the world we dream is the real world. But since we wake up from the dream world through our organization, we gain the perspective in waking life to examine the reality value of the dream world. Only when we are outside the dream, only when our senses and our will are, as it were, switched on to the external world around us, do we have a point of view from which to assess the reality value of the dream world. Of course, no one may judge what is spatial reality from the point of view of a dream. For healthy thinking and healthy willing, only the reverse assessment is possible.

Now, while someone is absorbed not in a dream world, but precisely in the world of daily reality, which, although in a different way from a dream, also provides us with diverse, colorful images, but images whose inner content we only recognize when we penetrate them, when we penetrate them in their interaction with what our mind gives us. As anthroposophy delves into this world of reality, as anthroposophy approaches the world of everyday reality in the same way that a dreamer approaches his dream world, you come to the question: Yes, is it not possible that a second awakening takes place, so to speak, in the human soul life? Just as the natural workings of our organism tear us out of our dreams, as our will is switched on during awakening into the external sensual world of reality, so it could indeed be possible that a further awakening is possible from the world that concerns our everyday consciousness. If that is the case, then it must be said that the reality value of the sensory world can only be assessed from the point of view of the world into which one awakens, the supersensible world, just as the reality value of the dream world can only be assessed from the point of view of the everyday world. I would like to say: Anthroposophy first asks itself the big question: Is such a second awakening possible? It does not want to sink back to recognize the world, into dream-like reality. It wants to go the opposite way; it wants to go the way that man goes from the dream into sensory reality. It wants to go further from sensory reality into supersensible reality. Whether one can do this depends, of course, on how one is able to penetrate the human soul life, in fact the whole human life. I would like to say: one must simply subject the soul and its life to examination to see whether it has the possibility of such a second awakening.

Now, my dear audience, such a second awakening is possible. Above all, it is possible if a person does not give in to intellectual arrogance, by which he says to himself: You were a small child at first, you were not yet equipped with the ability to think, feel or willpower as you have as an adult; you had to develop them with the help of your human environment, with the help of your education, with the help of life, these abilities, to the degree that you now have them. But if, as an adult, you discard intellectual arrogance and ask yourself: Is it possible for the abilities to be further developed from the level at which you have brought them as an adult, just as they have developed from the childlike stage to the stage of everyday life? And you are led on the path of such further development of human abilities when you pay special attention to individual such abilities.

Let us first turn our attention to that faculty of the human soul or, let us say, of the human being that is usually called memory in life, the gift of remembrance. Let us first consider it as memory presents itself in everyday life. Out of the realm of the soul, in the midst of impressions of the present, perhaps evoked by these impressions of the present, thought images emerge, pale thought images of something we may have experienced years ago. And so what emerges from the depths of the soul or is brought up by present-day perceptions is mixed with the all-embracing, transforming power of the imagination, perhaps with some fantasy too. And so, through the power of memory, we have before us images of something that can undoubtedly be said to It is in a fairly realistic way, in the kind of reality that we are accustomed to when we open our eyes and when we hear our surroundings with our ears; it is not present in this reality. We take events into our memory images that simply consist of our having entered into this or that relationship with this or that person, this or that natural event, or something else, years ago.

What took place there is no longer reality today. But we have the ability to present to ourselves from the depths of our soul, in more or less pale or more or less meaningful images, what, in the way we otherwise perceive reality through the senses, is not present reality. This ability to remember can be cultivated. And it is cultivated when a person delves into his or her own thought life in a way that is not usually done in everyday life, particularly today. When people devote themselves to their thoughts today, they are usually thoughts that have been inspired from outside or that arise as memory thoughts in the way I have described. If someone is honest with his soul life, he must say to himself: what the external impressions provide, what arises from the depths of the soul life as memory, is actually what makes up this exterior of the soul life.

But there is something else we can do. We can tear ourselves away from this, I would say passive role that we play in relation to our thinking. We can try to live in our thoughts with an ever-increasing inner activity. You can live in thought in such a way that you simply form thoughts that you can easily grasp; so that you can be sure that if you devote yourself to these thoughts with strong inner activity, you will not fall prey to suggestion or mystical dreams, if you only present thoughts that are easy to grasp to your soul in such a way that you do not let them scurry away like thoughts that are stimulated from outside or inside. Then you realize that in this thinking, which is brought about by your own arbitrariness – in this life, in the activity of thinking, something develops within the soul life that can be compared to what happens when we use a part of our muscles in external physical work, for example. They become stronger, they become more powerful, it is precisely in active application that the muscles become stronger and more powerful. However, we notice this in a different way, in that we repeatedly and repeatedly immerse ourselves in thoughts that we have woven ourselves or even made ourselves or acquired from some spiritual researcher, through our inner will — if I may put it that way. We become inwardly stronger in soul, and we notice when we do such exercises – for some it takes longer, for others shorter, it can take weeks, it can take years – when we continue such exercises, we notice: the inner strength of our soul awakens. And it awakens in such a way that we become acquainted with that which we previously only knew as a memory in a transformed, reshaped form. A new inner ability, I would say an increased ability to remember, but one that does not simply deliver memories to us, we feel them in our soul.

And in the moment when this power has become strong enough, when the thinking that has been repeatedly and repeatedly seized in inner activity – the thinking that is now not only thought but is experienced, so that one feels it as an inner reality – in the moment when this inner thinking has become strong enough, something occurs, it usually occurs piece by piece, something occurs before this human soul that it has not known before. It is not just memory that comes before the human soul, but the direct perception of what the person has experienced since about the first years of childhood within this earthly existence. But what the person experiences is not a collection of laboriously recalled images, but something that suddenly presents itself to the soul like a vast tableau of life, so that one can see one's past life as it is present, as if time had become space. If one is able to do this, then one also feels one's self in a completely different way than is possible in ordinary consciousness, actually no longer in the physical body. One feels connected with one's self with all the experiences one has gone through and which now come up in this enormous memory tableau for the consciousness.

I would like to call that in which one now experiences oneself, as one experiences oneself in physical life in one's earthly life in the arms, the head, in the legs, I would like to call this sum of life images, of which one feels: It is oneself, it is one's self, only extended beyond one's earthly lifetime. I would like to call it the temporal body in contrast to the spatial body, in which one perceives oneself for the ordinary consciousness. It is the first supersensible experience that one has in this way.

But now — and this is the significant thing — one does not experience this tableau, this time body, in such a way that one looks at it externally, but rather, by immersing oneself in thinking again and again with activity, with inner activity, one has acquired the possibility of being immersed in the experiences, of having them as if they were present, of really being one with this temporal body, not just existing in space but moving through time and feeling like a human unit through the time that one moves through. One expands one's existence almost to the point of one's birth as a continuous reality.

That is the result of what I would call transformed memory. While you are in this state, looking at yourself as being immersed in your previous life, you do not have the opportunity to develop the memory in any particular way. In fact, the one who experiences this must experience it again and again, at least in a shadowy way, if he wants to have it before him. The fact that one has turned memory into something else for this supersensible world, into the contemplation of a finer world of time, has the effect at the same time that memory itself is extinguished for the moments when one beholds this higher world. But the one who develops in this way in a healthy way will not, like a mystical dreamer or a somnambulist, involuntarily come to a different way of imagining, but will come to this different way of imagining with full consciousness. This also enables him, I might say, to return again and again to the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. He is able, despite looking first into the first realm of the spiritual world, to stand with both feet in sensual reality in a healthy way and not to become a mystical dreamer and fantasist.

But in this way, man attains true self-knowledge. For it is not what has approached me from the outside that appears in this tableau of life, but precisely how one has intervened in external events. There is a difference between someone making an effort to recall the events they have experienced in their ordinary consciousness and memory, and what I have just described, when one recalls the events one has experienced at one's birth in one's ordinary consciousness and memory. Above all, one is interested in how the world has affected one, how this or that person has approached one, what effect this or that natural event has had on one. When you have this higher spiritual, transformed memory tableau before you, then you actually do not see what another person has done to you, but rather you see how you yourself have behaved towards the other person, how you have behaved towards this or that natural event, this or that fact of life. One sees oneself as acting, as active. In short, my dear audience, one has advanced to a real self-knowledge, to a vivid self-knowledge. This is due, if I may express it so, to the strengthening of thinking to such an extent that one feels one is now living in one's thinking as one otherwise lives in one's blood circulation, in one's breathing.

In ordinary life, thoughts are dull and shadowy. They are not compelling; they are not something in which one lives as one does in one's blood or as one does in one's breathing. By practicing in the way I have described, one senses one's life in thought, as it were, just as one otherwise senses one's life in the physical body. And then one knows that in addition to the physical body that a human being carries, there is this second time body, which is not spatial – it can be drawn spatially, but that is only an illustration – that there is this second time body, which is infinitely finer, if one may use this expression at all, than the physical body. In my writings I have called it the etheric or formative body, because one must have an expression for these things. One need not be offended by expressions. This, alongside the physical body, is the second link in the human being, and it leads up the first stage to the supersensible body in order to penetrate further. For one learns through such contemplation only one's own human being for this earth life.

To penetrate further, it is necessary, so to speak, to develop the opposite strength to that which consists of immersing oneself in thoughts. It is indeed the case that Anyone who is familiar with this immersion in thought knows how it captivates people. Indeed, if you do it the way I describe it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in 'Occult Science: An Outline', you do preserve yourself. You do acquire this world, however, if you do the exercises the way I describe them there, in a completely free way. You are not influenced by what you experience, you stand in it as a free human being in the sensual outer world.

But still, to the same extent that anything in the external world that particularly moves us captivates us, this world, which we experience when we immerse ourselves in thought, captivates us; little by little — it is not even an exaggeration, my dear audience — one has the feeling: you now live in this power of thought, just as you otherwise live in your physical body. And yet, if one wants to progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to overcome precisely this stage. For one must be clear about this: this stage is actually only what I have called an [imaginative] stage in my books. One experiences what the world has implanted in one during one's life on earth, what one has, so to speak, imagined as one's own conception, feeling, will — not in the sense of a fantastic education, but in the sense of really imagining what one has imagined.

But one experiences only what one is in the strictest sense as a human being, one experiences only one's human soul. And one does not yet have the right to say that this human soul, which one experiences as in a time body, that this has a continued existence beyond earthly life. For this, higher exercises are necessary. For this, it is necessary that one can now inwardly put oneself – just as one has placed the thinking before the soul, how one has immersed oneself in the thinking, so that the thinking became a life – to suppress this thinking again at any time in complete inner freedom. But that means something special now.

If you have freed yourself from the physical body in the sense I have just described, if you have settled into the etheric body, then initially suppressing the life of thought does not mean falling back into the physical body, but remaining outside of the physical body. But what one has acquired from outside the physical body is suppressed. And one establishes what one might call an empty consciousness. That is the significant thing, that man develops his inner soul abilities to this level of empty consciousness.

I would like to say: just as a person breathes in ordinary life, how he inhales and then exhales again, how the inhalation contains the air of life and the exhalation the air of death, so too, at this higher level of experiencing the mind through thinking, the person must come to stir thinking within himself, just as he stirs the inhaled air as a physical organism. But he must also be able to bring this thinking experience out of his soul. Then the consciousness becomes empty. But once one has attained this possibility of an empty consciousness, one has penetrated to alternating in the soul between being filled with inner powerful thinking, which proceeds in the images as I have described in the tableau of life; once one has achieved being able to alternate between these images and between having nothing in the soul, then after a while – all these things have to be awaited with patience and energy – the empty consciousness that one has achieved in this way does not remain empty, but external perceptions do not arise either. A spiritual world appears around us. And we acquire the ability to live for a while in what we awaken within as images of our own earthly life, and to change it by suppressing these images, by taking the approach of creating empty consciousness by alternating with being filled with external spiritual world content.

Yes, my dear audience, into this empty consciousness now enters the phenomenon of a spiritual world, which we distinguish from what we know ourselves to be in the time body, just as we distinguish the outer colors and sounds from our physical body when we stand in the world of space, in the physical world. We learn to distinguish between what we perceive externally as the spiritual content of the world, as a world of spiritual beings that is around us just as the physical world of physical facts and physical beings is around us, and we learn to distinguish ourselves from this spiritual world.

If I was able to say that the first step of supersensible knowledge comes to a real kind of self-perception, which is an intensified thinking, then this second step, through which we recognize a real spiritual world, through which we experience that there is a spiritual world around us, like the sensual world. This second ability can be compared to the soul activity that we pour into our physical organism when we speak. Speaking is not just a physical, mechanical expression of the human organism. What the physical organism reveals when a person speaks is poured into what is the soul life, and what flows in the words and sentences is what soul life is. When we learn to suppress amplified thinking as I have described it, we learn something in addition to this suppression of thinking, which I will describe in a few words. It is something that is known, but in this case it is described differently with these words. One does not just learn to suppress thinking, but rather one learns to be inwardly silent in a higher sense than is the case in ordinary life. Yes, when the empty consciousness is established, the inner experience is there: now the soul is silent. I said that I use the word as it is used for not speaking in ordinary life. But the word means something different in this case. This silence after suppressed thinking is now a positive inner experience, so to speak, as we otherwise fill ourselves, say, with joy or pain, with what our speech contains, what our words contain. In the same sense, we now feel ourselves immersed in our supersensible being in the way described: we are filled with silence. And this silence is of a special kind in yet another respect.

I have to use a comparison to express myself clearly. I have to say: let's assume we are in the middle of a big city, with all kinds of noise around us. We move out of the city, the sounds get weaker and weaker because they sound further and further away; it gets quieter and quieter. We go out into the solitude of the forest – it becomes even quieter. Finally, we are surrounded by complete silence. But I would like to say: this silence is only the zero. We can go further. We can diminish even further what silence means simply as something that is not heard – if I may use a very trivial expression – just as we can diminish even further when we have spent our assets down to zero, we can diminish these assets even further by getting into debt, by having even less than zero. This is how we can diminish silence. There is something deeper in the soul after the thinking has been suppressed than there is in silence. There is an inner strength in this intensified silence, and in this intensified silence, this stillness, which goes beyond the stillness of zero, this stillness produces something that is not an external thing but an inner language , a language that does not come from the depths of the soul, but that – one experiences it clearly – comes from the supersensible world, in which one is now in this supersensible being, as I have described it. One now feels compelled to describe what one experiences in the inner silence of the soul. One experiences the spiritual world, and from the spiritual world it is as if it speaks to us through the silence of our soul. It really speaks to us. Only one must not pour this speaking into the words that are otherwise produced with our speech organs, but one must pour it by using the natural phenomena themselves to express that which is revealed there as the spiritual world. That is how it happens. But what happens is that — my dear audience — one wants inner elementary naturalness, as it is the behavior towards the outer sensory world. I perceive something spiritual in the world in the way described. This spiritual makes an impression on me, a very specific impression. This impression stands directly before my silent soul. It is the same as the impression made by the color red, not in the way I saw the red color, but just as when I see in my memory a red color surface completely illuminated, I see not the redness of the color, but the memory of the color, the redness of the color. But it is something completely different. So I now experience the direct presence of a spiritual in the soul. I have to express this direct presence of a spiritual in such a way that I remember, so to speak. This spiritual affects me like the red or blue color. I can compare the spiritual in the red or blue color with this or that sound, although it is not at all meant to be any sound of the external sensory world. In other words, my language in relation to the spiritual world becomes very special. My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes such that I make use of sensory phenomena to characterize and express what is revealed to me in the spiritual world. However, these sensory phenomena belong to the spiritual entities and events just as little as the word thinking ultimately belongs to thinking itself. One describes that which one beholds in the spiritual world, as I have described it, for example, in my “Theosophy”; but it is a language that one uses. One makes use of the colors of the senses, the sounds of the senses, in order to describe that which one has to describe in the spiritual world. It is a language, it is the language of the silent soul.

And when the soul has progressed in this way, then even if the power that suppresses thinking and creates silence in the soul is simply strengthened, the whole tableau of self-introspection can be erased. I can, as it were, extinguish my temporal body. Just as I would otherwise only extinguish individual images or isolated thoughts from my consciousness, I now extinguish everything that I have experienced as an earthly human being since my birth. Once I have learned to establish consciousness with the silence of the soul, not only does the comprehensive spiritual world emerge, as I have just described, but also one's own true being, which the person was before descending into a physical world in a previous existence. Now, through the suppression of what one has experienced as an earthly human being, through the empty, silence-filled consciousness, one gets to know one's pre-earthly existence, thus the soul in the state in which it is eternal, in which it was before it entered physical earthly life through the physical human germ. Now one attains, not through philosophical speculation, but through a real contemplation, the knowledge of the eternity of the human soul.

But with that, one also attains knowledge of the whole connection between this human soul and the human body. For one now learns to look into the world in which one was before one descended to earthly existence. And now one learns to recognize how, in this world, which is a purely spiritual one, in which one was before one descended to earthly existence, now one learns to know how this human being, the one who is before one, is the human being, just as the extra-human on earth is the world. One learns to recognize how the human being had developed his supersensible senses — if I may use this paradoxical expression —, his supersensible senses, before he descended into a physical body, precisely in terms of the nature and essence of the human being, how he then, in his pre-earthly existence, saw through the secrets of man, as he saw through these secrets of man in the spiritual world, while he was in his eternal nature, not clothed in his physical body.

And with that, the realization of it also presents itself, the vivid, not speculated realization of how the human being passes through that which it maintains in its eternal being when the human being passes through the gate of death. Beliefs can be formed about that which lives beyond death. It is not at all intended to say here that these beliefs need to be wrong or inadequate; nothing should be said against their correctness. However, we are already living in an age in which man is directed to penetrate to that which is given to him through knowledge and the content of knowledge, not through the content of faith. Therefore, the path of knowledge should be sought, not the mere path of faith.

One comes to understand how the human soul itself is connected to the physical body, how it lives within the blood circulation, lives in the breathing process, lives in every single bodily function. One therefore learns to recognize how not only an ascending, sprouting, and burgeoning life is present in physical life on earth, but, after getting to know the eternal character of the human soul, one sees how this human soul lives in the physical body. One learns to recognize that the will, the growth force, is bound to the sprouting and sprouting forces, but one also learns to recognize that thinking and a part of feeling are bound to the destructive forces of the human organism.

Yes, my dear audience, when you grasp a thought, an idea, it is not a process of growth that takes place, but a process of decay, a kind of atomistic dying process. We are constantly dying as we think, and the same applies to part of our feeling. As physical human beings on earth, we carry within us that which grows like a plant grows. But we also carry within us that which, within our nervous system, continually withers away like a plant withers. But while the plant, in withering away, only decays, we have, alongside what I would call the crumbling away of dying, the possibility of thinking and part of feeling within us. In this way, we look at human life on earth differently than we would through a mere external physiology. We see how the human being comes to his or her thinking, how thought first takes hold, so to speak, when matter is no longer alive in its growth force or even when the structure of matter is destroyed.

Matter is so little the master of our thinking that matter must give up its own nature in our organism where thought wants to rule. Thought rules in our organism in that its whole structure is not the growth of matter, but in that matter withers away. Matter first makes way for thought. If we learn to know partial death in this way, I would say, we learn to recognize how something always dies in us, precisely in order to make room for our spiritual, then we arrive, especially when we have trained our thinking and inner silence as I have described, then we arrive at being able to really see and recognize the human eternity on the other side, beyond death. But something else is needed for this.

And now, dear audience, I must briefly mention something that will certainly seem extremely paradoxical, but it is nevertheless a reality. There is still a soul power that needs to be specially developed if one is to see through the fact that death is just hinted at. While one is developing this empty consciousness, this inner silence of the soul, one also increasingly acquires the need to further develop a soul force that is otherwise present in us, that plays an extraordinarily important role in human life, such a soul force into the spiritual, into the soul. This is the power of love. Love, the noblest of the soul forces, can also be the lowest in a certain respect. It plays its great role in life. So when a person goes through this stage, first feeling at home in his temporal body, then looking to this much higher body – if I may use this expression – which he wore in his pre-earthly existence, his soul powers are so heightened that he also feels the need to increase his ability to love. That is why I have also indicated in my writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' those exercises that increase the ability to love. If one increases this ability to love in parallel with the other abilities mentioned, then one gradually comes to experience in one's own life on earth that which one has seen as one's own nature in the pre-earthly existence. And now one experiences a third aspect of human nature.

In ordinary life, one has otherwise experienced one's physical body, through the way I have described, one's etheric or formative body, the temporal body. Now one experiences oneself in one's actual supersensible body, in which the soul life takes place. One now recognizes this as the one for whom space must always be created by matter, in that matter destroys its structure so that the actual soul-spiritual can spread throughout our organization. And now we also experience, by first seeing how, as it were, matter falls out of the nervous system, becomes dead, and the soul-thought element asserts itself, now we learn to recognize how the soul passes over into the spiritual world when the whole body falls away in death.

I had to describe to you, my dear audience, while speaking of human immortality – I wanted to characterize this question of the three mentioned today – while telling you this, I had to speak in a different way than is often spoken in a philosophical way. In philosophy, it is assumed that one can stick with ordinary thinking, that one can combine thoughts and that one can thus arrive at insights into the immortality of the soul through judgments and conclusions. But here I had to point out to you, based on anthroposophical striving, how one must first develop the human soul with the suppression of intellectual arrogance in order to arrive at the contemplation of the eternal essence, the soul-spiritual essence in man.

But this, dear attendees, is not a mystical activity in the soul, not a dream; it takes place in the soul with the same inner clarity, yes, I would even say with the same inner sobriety as breathing and thinking. Actually, anyone who engages in anthroposophy in the way I have indicated, as you can read in my books, always feels an obligation to treat their soul powers no differently than a mathematician does, to always give an account of the part of their soul life, step by step. It is the same activity that one performs in anthroposophy as in mathematics, except that mathematics deals with dead spatial and numerical relationships and thus what it inwardly grasps spiritually in its forms, in its geometric, arithmetic and algebraic and so on, is applicable only to the outwardly dead. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, creates in the living. Everything is alive. And therefore, what it has grasped, I would say in a mathematical way, it can apply not only to the living, but also to the spiritually existing dead.

When you are surrounded by his pictures in a room, you are alone with yourself as a human being. The person standing next to you, the other people who may be in the room, have a completely different world. If they are all dreaming, they may dream of different things. With his dream world, man is completely alone, isolated. The moment he wakes up, the moment he turns on his will and his senses into the surrounding sensory world, he is no longer isolated; he experiences a shared external world with the other people. But his inner life, his actual soul life, is something that man has only for himself, even within the sensory world of earthly existence. It is like a dream. We only have this for the sensory world outside; inside, everyone dreams their own soul world. In the moment when we look into the pre-earthly existence or, as I have described it, into the existence that a person enters before passing through the gate of death, in that same moment we also have a spiritual-soul existence with the other person. We live in a spiritual world like all souls. Therefore, anthroposophy does not merely open up the idea of immortality, but a real understanding of it: when you pass through the gate of death, you discard your physical body, you continue to live in the spiritual world in your spiritual and soul nature. But also those earthly relationships you had with other people – those you had with those you loved, were related to, or otherwise cared for, friends, like-minded people, and so on – all that is earthly about them falls away. But what your own soul lives on, you live that in community with those with whom you have entered into relationships, you also live that with those who have preceded you, perhaps or after they have also come to the spiritual world.

The real community relationship after people have gone through the gateway of death comes to the immediate realization of knowledge, which has achieved it — if I may use this expression — to develop inwardly transparently and clearly like mathematics, and on the other hand wants to reach up again to the highest questions of human existence. Anthroposophy honestly strives for such knowledge.

And since humanity has actually become accustomed to gaining clear and transparent insights into what it wants to know through the admirable science of nature, if humanity has not numbed itself, it will not be satisfied in the long run with mere beliefs – which, after all, also only incidentally emerged from ancient knowledge – humanity will have to attain spiritual insight just as it has attained natural insight over the past three, four, five centuries. The human soul would have to numb itself to the highest questions of its existence if it did not strive for such spiritual insight. Call it anthroposophy or whatever you like, but such spiritual insight is a need for most people of the present day, even if this need is still deeply rooted in the subconscious. So much of the weal and woe of present-day humanity stems from this need. If we shed light on what sits unconsciously in the mere perception of today's humanity, which feels unsatisfied, which has become nervous, which has all kinds of disharmony and chaos in the soul and also carries this into the world, then we come to the conclusion that that although these people do not grasp this or understand it, they have a deep need to gain knowledge about the spirit, just as humanity has gained knowledge about nature, which has led to external technology. This knowledge will lead people to an understanding of external experience, but also to a deeper understanding, to a truly inward soul understanding of morality. This too, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy is meant to achieve.

And the Goetheanum wanted to be the outer shell. Goethe spoke beautifully about art when he first encountered it in Italy. In his own way, he wrote beautiful words to his friends in Weimar: “I have a suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” Goethe was seeking in art a sensual expression, a sensual revelation of that which spiritual knowledge glimpses when Goethe spoke from the depths of his soul the words: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without it” – without art, that is. Goethe was looking at the cognitive aspect of the human being in relation to the spiritual world – not the sensory world – as that which permeates the human being to such an extent that he then, as a sculptor, painter, musician and so on, wants to conquer form out of spirit. So, one could say, for Goethe, knowledge was one expression of human endeavor, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment the other. It is only in the course of human development, in the direction of abstract thought, of the theoretical, in which we have become so immersed today, that art of knowledge has become alien. Goethe, on the other hand, strove to bring knowledge to art and art to knowledge because he knew that nature, namely by creating the human form, creates itself as an artist.

What use is it – dear attendees – to say, however strongly you may want to, that you cannot visualize artistic images if you want to recognize something? If nature itself creates like an artist, then you simply do not learn to recognize nature if you only want to recognize it logically, and you least of all learn to recognize people if you are not able to gradually move from strict logical thinking to an artistic, visualizing comprehension of what lives in the human form, in colors, in everything human. A straight path leads from the cognitive to the artistic.

Now, in this sense, one also wanted to be Goethean in that moment when some friends of that world view, which I have again sketched out for you today with a few strokes, came together in a spirit of sacrifice to create a place in Dornach near Basel. I was commissioned to build this place.

Many people have got into the habit of saying: those who call themselves anthroposophists follow my word, they believe only in my authority. Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I believe that no one can say that they see their will fulfilled less through their followers than I do. I say this, although it may sound paradoxical: most of the time, what I want does not happen.

I was commissioned to build this very place in a certain way. If such a place had been built for any other worldview, one would have gone to this or that architect; the architect would have built a Gothic, Renaissance or ancient building in this or that style for the cultivation of this worldview or spiritual current. That could not be done for anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy wants to be — you will have recognized this from my description today — something that fits into the spiritual development of humanity as a new impulse. Anthroposophy really wants to lead to a change in knowledge: that the human being can achieve this second awakening, of which I have spoken, which is shown when the attempt is really made in the described way. Then the human being wakes up into the supersensible world. Then he can judge the sensory world here as he can judge the dream world from the sensory world. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is not abstract knowledge, it is not a sum of theories, it is not a thought-up world view, it is something that one must experience. It is not something that merely fills the head, it is something that fills the whole human being and seeks its human center in the heart. Then, however, it cannot be exhausted in a one-sided activity, then it must permeate everything that comes out of human nature. Then a person cannot advocate a worldview within a structure that was built from a completely different worldview. Within a Greek or antique, thus actually a Renaissance or Gothic building, one can advocate that which has emerged from the Greek or Gothic outlook. Anthroposophy needs its own envelope by its very nature. For it is not merely an outlook, it is not merely a theory, it is life and becomes life in man, as blood does in an organism. And just as blood builds up the human body artistically, so does the one who experiences anthroposophy build what he builds as a place for it. I have often used a simple, trivial comparison, but it is meant to be deeper. I have said: look at the nutshell. You cannot imagine that other forces are at work in the nutshell than those within [in the nut itself, which we eat instead of the nutshell]. Out of the same forces, in a similar form to which the nut itself is created, [the nut shell] is completely adapted to the nut; so the building envelope must be that which is not theory, but life, in the grasp of all the life forces of the human being.

And so the Goetheanum had to be such that, for example, when one stood on the podium and spoke, the words one chose to express what was revealed by supersensible vision thought-forms, they had to express what spoke to people's eyes from the forms of the columns and the paintings on the domes. The whole had to be in harmony down to the last sensual form.

And again, when the art of eurythmy was cultivated in Dornach, this art in which the human being comes to a visible language through complicated gestures that are completely drawn from his nature, so that one can express a poem in individual movements as well as through recitation and declamation — when the stage was filled with moving people, who were performing some kind of poetry or music in their movements, not dancing but singing in movement —, what was happening on stage was a continuation of what the forms were that surrounded the audience in the building. When the spectator turned his eye to the columnar forms, to the forms of the cupolas among themselves, when he turned his eye up to the cupola paintings, he had a similar basic feeling as when he looked at the stage and eurythmy was taking place.

Just as the nut can only be in its shell through the laws it has formed itself, so when Anthroposophy was given the opportunity to have its own house, it could only create this shell artistically out of the spiritual realm, out of which it itself experiences its world view, out of which the whole world view that takes hold of people is born. The Goetheanum wanted to be to the eye what Anthroposophy is to the direct apprehension of the soul through the word.

Because Anthroposophy still seems strange to people today and because all sorts of things are made of it by those who do not know it — I have characterized this in the beginning —, therefore what was the outer shell of a new architectural style seemed strange to people, just as the nutshell will seem strange to someone who knows nothing about nuts but believes that something is present in an arbitrary form and shape. Just as the world itself is shaped, so attempts have been made to create out of a spiritual world of impulses, taking hold of the anthroposophical world view, and also artistically, in Dornach.

The Goetheanum wanted to show this in its external forms under construction, entirely in the Goethean style: Art is a revelation of those secret laws of the universe that cannot be revealed without art – just as the Goetheanum speaks in sensual forms where the thought itself expired into sensual forms. There was no symbol, there was no allegory, there was artistic feeling everywhere, where the thought as mere thought is no longer enough, where the thought only becomes complete when it overflows into artistic form. But since the thought is born of the spirit, that into which it pours is also born of the spirit. Art is entirely for contemplation, but it is nevertheless, like everything in the world, born out of the spirit. Therefore, my dear audience, even for those who truly understand anthroposophy in their innermost being, something has been lost at the Goetheanum that is, in a sense, irreplaceable, because the Goetheanum was not intended for thinking up, explaining or describing, but for contemplation, because it was intended to visualize that which comes from the same source, namely anthroposophy. But what Anthroposophy can only give in words, which almost cries out to be poured out into a sensory form — what should be vivid —, that is what the fire has taken away, so to speak. In short, the way Goethe thought in relation to knowledge is what he wanted to be embodied in the Goetheanum. The Goetheanum wanted to reveal what Anthroposophy is meant to express.

Just as the human soul reveals itself as immortal in the mortal body through anthroposophical contemplation, so I may say without sentimentality: the body may fall away, even though all the pains and all the suffering that we know are attached to it. Only when the body falls away do we think of the immortality of the soul. And so today I may well conclude with the words that are only intended to illustrate what I meant not theoretically but humanly, emotionally, and intuitively today in answering the question: “What is anthroposophy and what did the Goetheanum want?” I would like to say — when the question arises: “What did the Goetheanum want?” it must be said: The Goetheanum wanted and needed to express the spirit in external matter, just as the human body is formed in external matter. That which is expressed in external material can be destroyed by the elements; but that which should live in the Goetheanum is itself of a spiritual nature. Anthroposophy does not want to be built and cannot be built out of external material; it can only be formed out of that which reveals itself from the spiritual, supersensible world. But this cannot be destroyed by any element, it is of a duration that may be characterized by saying: Yes, anyone who can look at the human soul impartially today knows that the human soul cannot remain calm for long when it comes to what it can learn today from knowledge about the [sensual]. It demands, even if still unconsciously, a supersensible knowledge. And because humanity will not be able to do without the knowledge of the supersensible in the long run, Anthroposophy may hope that, although it has now lost its home, it will revive all the more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity and to see through true human destiny. spiritual word, that it will come to life even more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity, to see through true human destiny, as the realization of the true spiritual, eternal essence of the human soul.