The Reorganization of the Social Organism

GA 330 — 9 July 1919, Stuttgart

XI. The Path to Psychic Experiences and Knowledge as a Basis for a Real Understanding of People

What I would like to say about certain things would not appear to me as a whole if I did not add today's lecture, which I have given here on the social question, to the one I gave today and the one I will give next Friday, because what has been developed here on the social question, although with seemingly quite different aims and from a seemingly quite different world, ultimately stems from the same human spiritual striving that I will be speaking to you about in these two lectures.

Those of you who have followed my book on the social question in the necessities of life, present and future, will have seen immediately in the first pages how the social question is approached from a point of view that decidedly considers the spiritual and cultural concerns of humanity.

As one of the phenomena that have brought humanity into its present situation, and without whose proper understanding this humanity cannot emerge from chaos and confusion, this book focuses on the relationship between humanity, cultural humanity, and the spiritual world in the last three to four centuries. It is emphasized how humanity's, I might say, negative relationship to the spiritual world is expressed in what has come to be the most widespread designation for this spiritual world: the expression, 'This spiritual world is mere ideology'. That is to say, the spiritual world is something that arises only as a superstructure on a substructure, like a kind of smoke rising from a material or economic reality. It is certainly true that in the last three to four centuries humanity has been repeatedly drawn into this view, as if all spiritual life were only a smoke rising from material life, only a superstructure on a substructure. But it is also clear to anyone who is able to follow the cultural development of the last three to four centuries and up to the present day that the whole state of mind of modern man, which is influenced by this relationship to the spiritual world, has led to the confusion and chaos in which we currently find ourselves. On the one hand, we have the terrible events of the world war catastrophe behind us, and on the other hand, the emerging revolutionary movement. We see, when we look back, how it became clear that people were no longer able to manage the external social life through their practical ideas. The facts have escaped these ideas, they have broken free, and they went their own way. They ran away without being held back by strong human ideas. And they ran into that which led them to ad absurdum, and through which the social life of the last three to four centuries was led ad absurdum. They ran into disaster. Various causes of this catastrophe have been investigated. Clarity on this point will not be achieved until it is realized that, as a result of the view of the spirit that one believed one had rightly arrived at, one has lost control over the facts of the external world and that one can only regain this control by acquiring a different relationship to the spiritual world. That is why all those who, from the standpoint of today's revolutionary movement, believe that the spiritual world is nothing more than an ideology, and base their reforms or revolutions on this view, will not bring humanity to salvation, but on the contrary will push it deeper and deeper into the abyss. Therefore, it is not just some subjective inclination of mine to speak in connection with the social question of what I have spoken of again and again every year here in Stuttgart as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This spiritual science movement is intended to bear witness to the fact that the spiritual in man and outside of man is not an ideology. It is to bear witness to the fact that man can only gain the necessary strength for his actions, for his life practice, if he draws it from those insights that initially seem far removed from practical paths, but that train the human soul in such a way that they bring this soul into a state in which it is then also strengthened for the management of practical life. And if many today believe that the events that lie ahead of us will only take place in economic struggles, they are mistaken. We just do not realize it yet, but we are in the midst of intense spiritual struggles and that which shakes and stirs humanity up in an elemental way, which expresses itself outwardly through material and armed struggles — it is nothing other than the wave that is thrown to the surface from the stirred human souls that are struggling for new truths, for new insights. Anyone who is able to examine their own inner being to a certain extent today will be aware that the education that all of civilization has undergone over the last three to four centuries no longer allows people to educate themselves about their highest, soul and spiritual matters in the way that was necessarily possible in the past. Over the past three to four centuries and up to the present day, man has undergone a scientific education, in general. This has led him to demand a path to the supersensible worlds, of which only religious denominations have spoken to him so far, a path that is on a par with the scientific path, that does not want to present itself merely as the path of religious feeling, but as the path of knowledge of the supersensible world, of the spiritual world, alongside the path of research into the physical world through natural science. Even if few people today admit this fact, it lives unconsciously in the majority of present-day cultural humanity, and what people often bring to consciousness today is only a veiling of the facts, which can be expressed with the words: We do strive in our inmost being for a knowledge of the spiritual world, and we carry within us numerous dissatisfactions and unfulfillments of life because this longing for knowledge of the supersensible rules in our soul, instinctively rules and is not yet satisfied by anything in the cultural endeavors of our immediate environment, of our entire spiritual life.

And so today, starting from such points of view, I will speak about the paths to supersensible knowledge and observation, and the day after tomorrow about the actual supersensible being of man, that is, the true being of man that outlasts his life between birth and death. And I would like to show how this knowledge must become a real social factor, having a say in the new construction of our human society. It is certainly undeniable today for many people that a certain insight into human striving in general, that which one could call self-knowledge in the broadest sense, is more difficult for people today than it was for people in previous centuries. If we look back at earlier centuries, we cannot but admit that man then came more easily to a certain understanding of his own nature from the elementary demands of human nature than he does today. But there is another fact that stands in meaningful juxtaposition to the one just described, and that is this: today more than in earlier times, man needs this self-knowledge, which is more difficult for him than for earlier man. This is expressed in the striving for such self-knowledge, which is there after all, even if it is hidden behind this or that mask by our difficult life circumstances. But today, in terms of his upbringing, his feelings and his living conditions, people want to ask the authorities they know as scientific authorities about the state of their soul and spiritual life. This is because they have been accustomed to making the scientific the guiding principle of their lives. And so they also want to turn to the scientific forum for self-knowledge and knowledge of human nature. But it must be said that precisely by addressing this forum, he can initially only receive unsatisfactory information. And so, little by little, something has crept into the public consciousness about the questions of the soul and the spirit, which basically can only lead to doubt and uncertainty.

From what usually emerges, so to speak, from the various scientific disciplines, from the rest of life, it is clear that today's human beings have no real idea of how much goes on within their inner selves without being aware of it in their ordinary consciousness. What does the modern man believe about himself? He believes that on the one hand he is a body; and many, if they are at all concerned about it, then say that on the other hand there is the soul. But when the big question arises about the relationship of the body to the soul, of the soul to the body, then doubts arise, then uncertainties arise. On the one hand, we believe that the body is exhausted in what we survey through the sensory observation of the human being, what we dissect and recognize through anatomy, physiology, in short, through everything that the scientific knowledge of the human being provides. This provides us today with a certain idea of what the human body is. Then the human being knows that he develops ideas, that he has emotions, that he has a will that drives him to action – in short, the human being knows that something lives in his consciousness, underlying the will, underlying the emotions or feelings, underlying the ideas. But when he then reflects, “What is the relationship between what I think, feel and will, between the content of my inner soul life and my outer life?” he gets no answer. For what science, the view of the human body through the senses, shows him, is so fundamentally different from what lives in the will, in feeling and in thinking, that a bridge cannot be built from the body to the soul. And it is not only the case for ordinary consciousness that one is faced with the impossibility of building such a bridge, but if one goes through the various scientific, scholarly views of today, they generally conclude with this: something certain about this relationship between body and soul cannot be said.

Anyone who speaks about this question from the standpoint of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as it is meant here, is compelled to look very seriously at the doubts and uncertainties that beset humanity and science in this way to a high degree. And he must say, based on his knowledge: Yes, for scientific knowledge, for the kind of knowledge that has brought us to the great triumphs in natural science, for this knowledge, it must be fundamentally the case that one is driven only into doubt and contradictions when asking the relevant questions. Scientific knowledge is unsuitable for illuminating those depths of human nature from which alone answers to the burning questions can come. Now, however, the same humanities scholar is in a very special position with regard to the thought habits of the present. Since he has to present his findings from a completely different point of view than that of these thought habits, it is only natural that he is attacked in a hostile manner and judged from all sides. For he must not only open up a different field of knowledge from the everyday and the ordinary scientific one; he must also draw attention to a completely different way of knowing. He must point out that the questions raised cannot be answered at all with the way of knowing of ordinary life and ordinary science, and that if man were to remain with this ordinary scientific knowledge, he would never arrive at an answer to these questions. The spiritual scientist must assert that through a development that he himself takes care of, man comes out of this ordinary way of knowing to a completely different knowledge, to a knowledge that initially appears to be a kind of fantasy to the ordinary. Nevertheless, anyone who speaks of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science on the basis of the assumptions being spoken of to you today knows that he stands on the same scientific rigor and the same scientific discipline as the strictest scientific method of the present day. Only what the natural scientist strives for, for example, certain proofs of these facts and these laws, forms the prerequisite for the spiritual researcher, as he is meant here, that is what he has been trained in. He has gone through this before coming to his spiritual science. And in this day and age, no spiritual science should present itself to the public that does not stand on this ground, that does not assert and that has really come to know through research in the spiritual world the very thing by which natural science has come to its 'triumphs'. The spiritual researcher must have put himself in a position to be a natural scientist in the strictest sense of the word. Only the spiritual researcher begins where the natural scientist ends. While the natural scientist searches for certain results for his life of ideas, for his thinking, the spiritual scientist strives to let that which one undergoes with natural science as a strictly methodical, as a conscientious scientific experience, be his education, and only from there to go out and ascend to those higher cognitions of which I will have to speak to you today and the day after tomorrow. Therefore, it is the case for the spiritual researcher that he cannot communicate in the usual sense: I observed this or that external fact; this or that law emerged for me from this or that external fact. Rather, the spiritual researcher must have gone through everything that the natural scientist speaks of as preparation; and he must have arrived, through this preparation, at a state of soul such that he rises to new facts, to new observations, of which he can only tell, and which alone can form the content of the truly spiritual world. Therefore, the spiritual researcher, as he is meant here, will have to speak of his paths of knowledge in a completely different way than the one who, for example, has only gone through a scientific path of knowledge, who has only gone through what is often called a path of knowledge, a path to science, within today's cultural life, today's spiritual life.

Ask those who have gone through a path to science today how they went through this path to science, I would say, with a certain inner calm. They can tell how they worked here or there in the laboratory, how they heard this or that about the processes of human, historical development, how they incorporated it into their concepts, how they compiled these or those statistical facts in order to gain these or those social insights. But we will hear from all of them how they went through it all in a certain state of inner calmness of soul and then, as it were, came into possession of the scientific concepts they had been striving for. The spiritual researcher, especially the anthroposophically oriented spiritual researcher, is not in such a situation. If he is serious about this, he will not be able to speak of such inner calm and indifference in which his path of knowledge was traversed as can be spoken of the paths of knowledge of external science today. The spiritual researcher, if he speaks the truth about his path of knowledge, will tell you about inner struggles and conquests. He will tell you of the abysses of the soul he had to go through before the true supersensible insights presented themselves to him. He will have to tell you how much his own human nature, that which is dear and valuable to man in his outer life, has often become an inner opponent of his striving for knowledge. He will have to tell you about the courage he often had to summon against the inner opposing and hostile forces that lie in human nature and are averse to the true path of knowledge. And so it will be that what the spiritual researcher has to say about soul and spirit is the result of those moods of the soul that have not taken place in inner calm, that have taken place in inner turmoil, that have taken place amid the most serious inner struggles. And this spiritual researcher will have to say that nothing other than inner suffering, inner pain and the overcoming of it, has brought about what he may justifiably call, as he believes, insight into the supersensible worlds.

The spiritual researcher will have to speak of the struggles he had to undergo in two directions. For many people today, these struggles are in an abstract world, but only for the faith of these many people. By consciously going through these struggles, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize that he is truly not alone in the world in going through these struggles. As a rule, the spiritual researcher is not so presumptuous as to say to himself that something is taking place in his soul in which other people have no part. He comes to say to himself that he is only raising to consciousness what unconsciously takes place as an inner struggle at the bottom of every human soul. And the spiritual researcher knows how these struggles, I would say, between the consciousness that lives in thinking, feeling and willing, and the body that external sensory perception and physiology and anatomical science show, how these struggles take place in between, and that they rise up into human consciousness like something that many people in the present time cannot cope with. What is expressed in their instincts and often in physical and mental illnesses, in their dissatisfaction and unfulfilled longings, what is expressed in their nervousness, without their knowing what the actual causes of this state of mind in the depths of the human being are.

The spiritual researcher has to struggle on two fronts: firstly, with the external world and, secondly, with his own inner being. For people today, natural science and its popularization in the way people think is often merely a reason to be happy about the great progress of humanity, and rightly so. For the spiritual researcher, however, the experience of natural science is a particularly intense life struggle. By delving into what today's natural science is, by not only penetrating intellectually to the usual scientific knowledge, but by wanting to experience what is contained in natural science, the spiritual researcher can only experience life with natural science as a struggle. Indeed, through sense perception, through the combinations of sense perceptions that the human intellect produces in the laws of natural science, one does learn many things about nature. But you know, and in earlier years I have often dealt with this fact in my lectures in other contexts, you know that precisely the most conscientious natural scientists and natural researchers come to the conclusion that there are limits to this knowledge of nature. The most conscientious natural researchers, they speak their “ignorabimus” precisely out of a certain deepening, that is, we will not penetrate the essence of things through nature. And now it is once in human nature, that when such a limit piles up, as it rightly piles up before the knowledge of nature, man then says to himself: Well, that is just a limit of knowledge, you have to stop there. He then speaks of insurmountable limits of human knowledge.

The one who lets himself be completely absorbed by the fact that he already feels the spiritual research profession within him, that which is in the soul as a full force, cannot simply stand still when science establishes such limits. Such limits become for him the cause to fight out a life-long struggle of knowledge with that which presents itself to science as power and matter, for example, or as something else. What science itself is unwilling to penetrate, the spiritual researcher must fight his way through with. Only then does the beginning of his path of knowledge and his observations begin; the observations that he cannot go through with as calmly as one goes through a laboratory observation, the observations that he must go through with continually calling upon new spiritual-soul powers of knowledge. And then, when man comes up against these limits and fights his fight, then he becomes acquainted with the reciprocal action between his own inner being of knowledge and the outer world. There he experiences a spiritual fact of observation that presents itself to him as a fundamental characteristic of all human life. As the spiritual researcher struggles with the outer limits of knowledge of nature, he realizes that he has to draw on something from his inner soul in this struggle that otherwise plays a very small role in the knowledge of nature. He has to draw on those powers of his soul that otherwise only come into play in the interaction between human and human or, in an attenuated sense, in the interaction with natural beings, with living beings. He must draw from his inner being the power of life, that power which we unfold when we stand face to face with another person and inner sympathy passes from our soul to the soul of the other person. And it forces itself upon him, not as something subjective, but as an objective fact, the very sober knowledge of nature, and the struggle with the limits of knowledge of nature and that which plays a great role in human nature and human life: sympathy, love, the fundamental tone of all human social intercourse. And man now learns through experience to recognize the relationship between the limits of nature, which stand in the way of his knowledge, and the power of love. Through direct observation, which he has brought about by strongly invoking his inner soul powers, he learns to recognize that at the moment he becomes more deeply involved in the struggle with the limits of nature, he must expend his power of love. It is as if his power of love were released from his soul and flowed over into those areas of nature that lie beyond the boundary. And now the spiritual researcher comes to the significant and deeply moving fact that human nature is adapted to its world environment in such a way that it is denied to penetrate into the inner being with ordinary knowledge. The inner being lies beyond the boundaries of nature. If we did not have such boundaries, we would not be able to be endowed with the power of self-sacrificing love in ordinary life.

A deep meaning comes into this human life through the realization of the connection between knowledge and love. One learns that one can only love in ordinary life by this love-power separating itself from our cognitive activity exercised through the intellect. This fact, this observation, must not only be considered intellectually, it must make the deepest impression on a person once he has grasped it, for in this way he comes to know the very special way in which he is placed in the world. And he knows what he has to do if he is a true spiritual researcher. He knows that he cannot continue to penetrate into what lies beyond the boundary if he has not first strengthened himself in the power of human love and love for all other things to a degree greater than he has in the ordinary life. One must be equipped with such a strong love for all things. This equipment must be the preparation of the innermost being of the soul if one wants to go further in the struggle with the outer world, as I have indicated to you. This path, which the soul must go through so that it does not lose the power of love, so that it is not, as it were, sucked dry of this power, but can enter unreservedly into the supersensible worlds, I have tried to describe in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. And I would here expressly note that such descriptions of the right path to knowledge essentially serve to prepare the human soul so that it can safely follow the higher path to knowledge. From the present time and into the near future, humanity will demand this higher path of knowledge precisely through scientific education. Humanity will — it is in a process of development, I will speak more about this the day after tomorrow — arrive at a point where it can no longer do without such insight into the spiritual worlds as I have indicated. Humanity will arrive at a point where it would feel mentally unhappy and lost if the path into the spiritual, the supersensible worlds were not opened to it. This path will be taken by an irresistible inner impulse.

But it will be necessary to show more and more precisely and in detail how human nature has to prepare itself so that it can walk this path safely, so that the human forces that are important for practical and social life, such as love, are not taken away from it. When a person engages in such inner thought exercises, whereby he makes his thinking, which otherwise stops at the boundaries of natural phenomena, stronger and stronger, you will find in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” such thought exercises, such meditations and thought concentration, through which thinking becomes ever stronger and stronger. When a person does such exercises, he comes to a point in his development where he sees inner experiences and observations placed before his soul that do not appear before his soul in ordinary life. Then he clarifies above all the one question, the fundamental question of the life of the soul: What is it actually that I perceive of the world through my senses, that I develop within me as a world of ideas? What is it actually? And he comes upon a most remarkable fact. When stated in the abstract, it does not seem so remarkable, but in its effect on the whole human being it is highly significant and has a shattering influence on the human soul. Man comes, precisely by intensifying his thinking in such a way that he has the feeling, “I am not only passively surrendering my thoughts to the world, but I am thinking in such a way that a will, directed not by me but by the beings of the world themselves, lives in my thinking.” man comes to realize, especially when he intensifies this thinking, when he makes this thinking stronger than it is in ordinary life — that all thinking and all sensory imagining of ordinary life is nevertheless nothing more than an image, that it has an imagistic character.

It is a great impression that one gets when one comes to this through the intensification of thinking: this ordinary thinking, which one develops by looking at the outer world, which one develops when one reflects on what one has experienced in the outer world, this ordinary thinking is basically only something that runs entirely in images. It is something that has no reality in itself, as it arises. There comes a moment when, if one has followed the spiritual development of modern civilized humanity, something is awakened in the soul that has a shattering effect. It is remarkable for someone who has really had the experiences I have just described to hear that one of the greatest minds of humanity, one of the greatest thinkers of this humanity, the first representative of the newer historical development of world-views, Cartesius, Descartes, uttered the remarkable sentence: “I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum.” That Descartes uttered this sentence is proof for the true spiritual researcher that he did not really look into the spiritual world, that Descartes did not come to that intensified thinking of which I have just spoken, as being based on such exercises as I describe in my book ”How to Know Higher Worlds.” Because when you get to that, then you say the word that Descartes wanted to say differently, then you say: I think, therefore I am not. Because as long as you remain with your soul in ordinary thinking, you are not. Thinking is an image, and one only becomes aware of what is reflected in it when one intensifies this thinking so that one does not experience it as shadowy as one experiences ordinary thinking, but as if permeated by the will; one experiences it as I presented it as pure thinking as early as 1892 in my Philosophy of Freedom.

When one experiences this thinking as an active, self-active process, then one knows that ordinary thinking is a shadow image of a reality, that one is not in the movement of thinking that one accomplishes. Therefore, it also follows from real spirit communication, from the real spiritual researcher, that by repeatedly reinforcing this thinking through the calm experience of thoughts with which he himself meditatively fills his consciousness, it is as if he grows into a reality with this thinking. Whereas he used to feel free in shadowy thinking, he now feels something like a spiritual drowning. And precisely for this reason he must make his whole being strong and vigorous in soul and spirit, so that he is armed against what opposes the intensified thinking, which inwardly, in the soul, is like drowning, like an extinguishing of consciousness. One must live one's way into this intensified thinking with a strong consciousness. In this way, by intensifying one's thinking, one actually experiences the shadowiness of ordinary thinking through direct spiritual perception. And then there comes a point in life that, more than anything I have been able to mention earlier, strikes this human life with a sudden shock. That is the point at which one learns to recognize what ordinary thinking and imagining actually is in its shadowiness, in its pictorial nature. One learns to recognize that it is the shadow of what one has experienced in a purely spiritual world before birth or, let us say, before conception, the shadow of reality, which is called prenatal reality. The life of a human being in the spirit, before birth, before conception, one experiences this, one feels it in the intensified thinking. And then one learns to recognize how one actually has the power of thought, of ordinary thought. One has the power of ordinary thought because one has led a different kind of life in the spiritual world before birth or before conception. And this different kind of life fades away according to this reality, it becomes a mere shadow, and we experience the shadow in our imagination, in our thinking. Time becomes like space. One looks back into the prenatal time, into the time before conception. One looks back into the spiritual world, and one sees the reality that one has experienced there. And just as a spatial phenomenon acts on another spatial phenomenon that is distant from it, so time acts like space. In this view, which I have indicated, prenatal life is still there. And it shows: by thinking, this prenatal life has an effect on my present life. I am, by thinking, dependent on this prenatal life. That shines into my soul being and through it I can think.

In short, what is called the human spirit, independent of bodily life, becomes a perception, but a perception that one must first struggle to attain through inner soul struggles. And now, now light comes into the ordinary view of the soul. Now one knows when one believes in ordinary life: there one has thinking, feeling, willing, which has no connection with the body — this must be so because in this ordinary life of the soul, in this imagining, one has only a reflection of a reality that has become paralyzed at our birth. Now we know that the soul is actually something else than what has been living with us since our birth. And now, when we step out into the world again with this intensified thinking, we see something else besides the ordinary sense world. One can also support oneself in the sense world, but that is not usually advised, and I am not advising it here either, I am just mentioning it for the sake of explanation: At the moment when you make an effort to develop an inner power of imagination of the soul, through which you are able, for example, to imagine a green meadow purely through your inner soul power quite differently than green, namely in the color of peach blossoms – it takes a strong inner effort to do so – then this inner effort that you make to not see the green, to see the soul's counter-color, not the physical counter-color, then this effort works in such a way that it supports you in generating that powerful, that strengthened thinking of which I have just spoken. But then you can also judge other external experiences differently than through ordinary thinking.

Then you meet another person, you enter into some kind of relationship with them, and you say to yourself – not with everyone, but in certain contexts with the other person, and also in certain contexts with other beings of nature, with the world in general. You say to yourself: Oh, I have not in vain reached to strengthen my thinking, I have become capable in this strengthened thinking to leap over the boundaries of nature, to look beyond the boundaries of nature. But then I see what happens to me in life differently than when I stood at these boundaries as at the boundaries of knowledge. Then I see what enters my life as fate, as fateful events, as an effect of past lives on earth that I went through before I progressed to the life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, which I have just said is reflected in ordinary thinking and imagining. In short, what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has to say about the life of the human soul in the spiritual world, about repeated earthly lives, is not a gray theory, is not a hypothesis, and is not spoken of as something that has been conceived, but is stated as the result of those cognitions and observations which one only penetrates to when one has prepared oneself for them in the way I have just indicated and as you will find it further explained in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

Today I have indicated the path to the supersensible worlds from this one side. I will speak about the whole context of the supersensible man the day after tomorrow. Today I still have to discuss the other boundary that the spiritual man comes to, the other boundary at which he has to fight a hard inner battle just as at the boundary of natural phenomena. That other boundary is the one which I would like to call the boundary towards one's own human inner being. It is the boundary that man often wants to deceive himself about by becoming a mystic in the ordinary sense. Just as the spiritual researcher has to live much more intensely with natural science than the natural scientist himself, because the natural scientist only comes to his usual results and insights, but the spiritual researcher has to have experiences, struggles with natural science, so the spiritual researcher must also really go through everything that the mystic builds on, in which the mystic often delights inwardly. But at the same time he must undergo an inner struggle with this very joy, with this edification. While the ordinary mystic believes that he can arrive at questions of eternity by a certain kind of immersion in his own inner being, the real spiritual researcher, in penetrating to this inner being of man after the manner of the ordinary mystic, is beset by the most bitter doubt and the most terrible uncertainty. Just as with natural science, the spiritual researcher has to struggle with mysticism, but now inwards. Just as the spiritual researcher must not stop at ordinary natural science and its limits, he must not stop at ordinary mysticism either. For precisely because he immerses himself conscientiously and without illusions in the human interior, doubts and uncertainties arise for him in the face of ordinary mysticism. Precisely because he develops what I have just characterized: the intensified thinking; because he clearly sees into what occurs through mysticism, in which many people feel so at home that they believe themselves to be resting in the divine substance when they inwardly mystically deepen, therefore the spiritual researcher cannot stop at this mysticism, because he has learned not to indulge in illusions when observing it. He has learned to really fight all forms of fantasy. He has trained himself in strictly disciplined, scientific thinking. And so he soon sees through what the mystic calls a life with his divine inner being, with his higher self, as nothing more than the experience of all kinds of unconscious reminiscences, which are only misinterpreted because they have incorporated themselves badly into the soul or because they are overshadowed by the memory.

You see, I would like to give you an idea of this, that the spiritual researcher does not allow himself to be blinded by any illusions; that the true essence of spiritual research, through an inner discipline, through a strict inner schooling, leads to all fantasy. Therefore, the spiritual researcher is not able to calm himself down in the way that the ordinary mystic does. He regards these as subjective reminiscences; he regards them as something to which the ordinary person, in his mystical contemplation, gives himself over to all kinds of illusions. But one thing becomes clear to the spiritual researcher: that one cannot penetrate at all in the way of this ordinary inner contemplation to anything that is really the human soul. One arrives at a true reality just as little as one arrives at a true reality through ordinary, unintensified thinking. One arrives only at the elevation of a certain refined soul egoism. One feels inwardly so well and comfortably when one can say that the soul is absorbed in the divine human being, and the like. Many of those who are revered as mystics live in this comfort, in this refined egoism. The spiritual researcher must see through the true facts here, because, precisely because of his strengthened thinking, it is clear to him what the actual facts are regarding this inner mysticism. It becomes clear to him that if one could penetrate in the ordinary way into the human interior down to the divine-soul core of the human being, one would then not have a power of the soul that is so extremely necessary for ordinary practical and social life: one would not have the power of remembrance, the power of memory. We only have the power of recollection, the power of memory, because we cannot, through inner experience in the ordinary sense, descend into the full human being. The spiritual researcher then acquires an inner insight into how one can truly descend into the inner being of a person through a kind of strengthening of the ordinary soul life.

You see, this ordinary life of the soul takes place to a very great extent quite unconsciously. For are we not, in fact, a different person every day? Anyone who engages in even the most superficial self-observation will notice that they are deeply affected by their experiences each day. Just think how the soul changes from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, by experiencing this or that. Think how we change from time to time, as we go through our lives between birth and death. But man undergoes this process very unconsciously, he does not observe himself in the process, and above all he does not develop the will to make himself different. In ordinary life he develops only a small degree of self-discipline, of self-education. By increasing this self-discipline, this self-education, by consciously taking himself in hand, man comes to recognize himself in life as truly becoming. If we do not just abandon ourselves to life as it presents itself to us, allowing ourselves to be passively trained by life, but if we actively set out to shape ourselves, to educate ourselves, so that we often say to ourselves: Today you cannot do this, you will do that do this or that, so that you can enter into this or that - in short, when you take what self-education is into your own will and become more and more aware of it and make it an exercise; when you do this systematically, then another power is added to the strengthened thinking. Details of this, of which there are many, can be found in the book mentioned. If one carries this out, then the will becomes something different than what it is. Then the will becomes so that it is permeated by thoughts, that it reveals itself as interwoven with light. While the will otherwise remains something very dark for us, which is only stimulated by the thoughts of the head, a thought shines out to us from those efforts of the will, when we have trained ourselves as I have indicated. The world in which we move at will becomes completely permeated with thoughts. The world does not become a mere symbol, but a great fabric of world thoughts, through our will having become active in this way. And then, from these world thoughts, knowledge comes to us that can be added to the others I have mentioned.

Once you have passed this other test of mysticism, once you have recognized that your will is imbued with world thought, then life expands in another direction, but in such a way that something occurs for which you must be prepared, so that no harm comes to the life of the soul. You will find more details about this in the book mentioned. Damage could be caused to the soul because in the moments when one looks into the spiritual world through this other willpower, which is illuminated by thoughts about the world, one must renounce memory, the ability to remember. One cannot remember what one has seen spiritually. If today, on the paths of training that I have just mentioned to you as the training of the will, I have done some spiritual research and want to tell you about it tomorrow, I cannot get it out of my memory. I can only tell you about it if I go through all the events that led to the experience again, so that it arises anew in my soul. One must renounce the actual memory. But instead, the human soul presents itself to the soul, that human soul that cannot be experienced through ordinary mysticism. One experiences it after one has passed the test of ordinary mysticism, after one has overcome that which adapts one to the ability to remember in life. Just as the ordinary world of thoughts and ideas is a shadow of prenatal life, so one beholds that which lives in the will, which otherwise remains so dark – that which lives below memory, that which is spiritually hidden in the human is spiritually hidden in the human body, but cannot be seen, because otherwise we would have no memory in ordinary life —, one then sees it as what remains as a germ when the human being has passed through the gate of death. Then one learns to recognize through direct observation, through perception, that which hovers before man as the immortality of the soul. Then one learns to recognize the spiritual connection between what lives in man before birth and what lives in him after death. Then one learns to recognize the eternal in human nature.

Today I have described to you the paths that lead to supersensible knowledge and observations, to that which gives man a consciousness of the immortality of his soul. I have shown you that it must become a modern path for the development of humanity to ascend to real knowledge of the supersensible world on the basis of everything that humanity has acquired in religious and scientific development. The day after tomorrow I will talk about how this human being presents himself as a supersensible being before our soul.

Today, to conclude, I would just like to summarize in a few sentences what appears to me to be the bridge between the lectures I have given here this year on a seemingly completely different subject and the lectures I am now giving.

You see, I have often had to ask myself in the times that have emerged from the terrible social experiences even before the world war catastrophe, then from the horror experiences during the world war catastrophe and now afterwards: What about the ideas and concepts, with the impulses that people need to really shape social life of their own accord? For man is compelled to shape this social life with the future in mind. And I have conscientiously, truly conscientiously, inquired in the literature and everywhere else I could think of about what ideas about social will are held by the economists of current opinion, by people who think about economics and have to do with economics, and on what basis they form such ideas.

I have just had a strange experience in this search. I have not made it easy for myself, this search, and I have not started from the immodesty of wanting to practice a frivolous criticism everywhere. The one who becomes a spiritual researcher is far from this frivolity. He is very inclined, precisely for reasons that you can gather from today's lecture, to lovingly respond to the ideas and will impulses that people produce. But still, I could not close my mind to the fact that especially the social and ethical sciences everywhere today suffer from a certain imperfection, from a certain lack of clarity of concepts. You can see this in practice when you look at the economists of the various schools of thought and see what one says about goods, about labor, about capital, what the other says about it, and so on. But what people say lives in the terrible struggles of the present, it lives itself out, it wants to be shaped. People fight, fight out of instincts. They make demands and do not know what they are talking about. This is something that weighs on the soul. And then it became clear to me, and I will say this quite openly, where the real harm lies. It became clear to me that in those conceptions which one wants to gain from what lives in human activity, in human production, what lives in what one person does for another in the social order, that which the mere scientific habits of thought give cannot live.

This, for example, is the terrible thing about Karl Marx's political economy, that it starts from the model of the habits of thought in the natural sciences, and that as a result it does not arrive at a true understanding of the external social situation of humanity, but only at a killing criticism and at the suggestion of fruitless revolutionary movements. This is the tragedy of present thinking. And so, when one has the opportunity to have spiritual science, the paths of which I have characterized to you today, on the one hand, and to have the great social questions on the other, one comes to the conclusion that this way of thinking, which people have developed over the last three to four centuries under the influence of ideological thinking and the unreality of spiritual life, is not sufficient to grasp social life. In order to grasp this social life, a training of the spirit is needed that can only be acquired through the spiritual world itself. What is contained in the circulation of goods on the market, what is given to them by human labor, cannot be understood unless it is related to the spiritual worlds to which the human soul belongs. And what lies in the work of one person for another in social life cannot be grasped if one cannot train one's thinking through thoughts that reach into the spiritual world. And one will not grasp what capital is in the right sense if one cannot measure its mode of operation in its purely material nature against what man is as a spiritual being.

In short, we cannot arrive at a knowledge of the social organism without first having spiritual science. This is a fact that has become clear to me, and it is from this fact that I have tried to build a bridge between spiritual science and the impulses for the threefold social organism. How this bridge looks in terms of the development of humanity into the future is something I will also have to talk about the day after tomorrow. I will have to speak about what arises from the basis of such a soul life, which is capable of understanding from common sense that what I have said today is based on truth, about necessities for the social development of the present and the near future.

For decades we have been hearing again and again from the present consciousness with a certain justification the call: the enslaved part of humanity must redeem itself, must free itself. For, whatever may happen in the struggle for this redemption, this liberation, this enslaved part of humanity has nothing to lose but its chains. Now, as true as that is on the one hand, it is nevertheless one-sided for the one who is able to see the whole world, the world that is before man, to see in the light of the spirit. For as hard as it is to bear chains in the material world, as those meant in the saying quoted, so justified it is to strive to shake off these chains, which one can only lose through a struggle – there is still something that must be said to be more terrible to lose than all material chains of humanity: that is the fulfillment of the soul with the realization of the true spiritual man. If we continue to develop under the relationship to the spirit that has emerged over the last three to four centuries, and which can be rightly regarded as an ideology, we could lose something that must not be lost: the awareness of the spiritual nature of man, of the eternal significance of this man. And it will be the task of modern spiritual science to ensure that this awareness is not lost, that man once again fights for a spiritual life in which he appears to himself in his true form. If it undertakes this task, it will make the most important contribution to the social reorganization of human life. But then, when one realizes this, one will also say: it is not only economic struggles that we must boldly sail into, but in the future there will also be spiritual struggles. May humanity prove strong and courageous in standing these spiritual battles, then it will not lose what it must not lose if it is not to sink into the abyss: the consciousness of spirituality, of the eternity of man.