116. The Essence of Anthroposophy

Today, anthroposophy is for many people a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm that serious science should not concern itself with through knowledge. And those who, among the many specialized subjects to which a scientist can currently devote himself, want to accept something similar to what anthroposophy talks about, find, or claim to find, that the way anthroposophy wants to recognize is the opposite of true science. It is still difficult for anthroposophy to seriously engage with contemporary science on a large scale. The representatives of science prefer to be able to categorize this dubious intellectual construct as a form of scientific enthusiasm or a philosophically decorated form of superstition.

But it cannot be said that minds disposed to enthusiasm and superstition find much joy in anthroposophy. Of course, some people of the kind who get an excited heart and nimble legs when there is talk of any kind of “Sophia”, or even of something “occult”, also believe they hear words in anthroposophy that they can think about in their own way. They fail to hear, out of politeness to themselves, that anthroposophy does not particularly value their thoughts. And those who talk about anthroposophy without any intention of engaging with it think they are being witty when they refer to their “hysterical, eye-rolling” followers. But for the real enthusiasts, the whole nature of anthroposophy is not sensational enough; it appears to them to be too much in the guise of thinking, which they prefer to avoid.

It is not easy to respond to this fluctuating image of anthroposophy with a brief description of its intentions. Not only do we have to talk about something that many consider recognizable and scientific, we also have to talk about the other differently.

Almost half a century ago, at the 45th Naturalists' Convention in Leipzig, one of the greatest naturalists of modern times, in his famous Ignorabimus speech, forbade the recognition of nature to enter the territory that Anthroposophy wants to speak about. It might therefore seem as if the spirit of modern natural science was to be renounced. This is not the case. Anthroposophy takes its place most earnestly on the ground of this natural science. It recognizes the blessings that have come from the scientific and intellectual treatment of observation and experiment. It seeks to work in no other spirit than that which is fostered by the modern scientific ethos. It seeks its true co-workers among those who can imbibe this ethos with understanding.

But she also sees the possibility of penetrating into a supersensible realm without having to deny the spirit of modern natural knowledge. The fate of many a thinker of the latest time makes a deep impression on her. I will mention here one of the most important, Franz Brentano, who, although little known to a wider public, has been of profound influence for a narrower circle of students. Brentano wanted to establish a modern psychology. The brilliant scientific results of the 1860s and 1870s, when he made his decision, had a suggestive effect on this excellent thinker. He wanted to work on the science of the soul in the spirit of natural science. One volume of this work appeared in the 1870s. There were to be four or five. However, he was unable to follow up the first one. A sigh in this first volume reveals the reason. Brentano soon found himself limited to dealing only with the everyday details of mental life by what he believed to be the true spirit of natural science. How the representation follows the perception, how attention works, how memory works, etc. – one could believe that one could elucidate these in the sense in which one observed and experimented on nature. And when he was writing his first volume, Brentano still thought he could continue in this spirit and still advance to the questions that seemed to him the essential ones for the science of the soul. What were all the individual investigations for, he exclaimed in despair, if they did not succeed in learning something about the questions that Plato and Aristotle had already considered essential: about the preservation of the spiritual and mental part of man after the decay of the physical body. Brentano was a thoroughly honest thinker. He wanted to continue in the spirit in which he had begun; and in no other way could he reach his highest goal of soul research. He could not do that. The natural scientific orientation of thought, if it honestly remained on its own ground, could not penetrate to these highest goals.

We must grasp this impossibility and, on the basis of this understanding, come to the other way of investigating the soul and spirit if we want to gather fruits equal to those of natural science. Anthroposophy comes to this understanding. It regards the thinking human being who conducts research about nature. He will best achieve his goal if he lets thinking only speak about the facts of nature. If he uses it only to bring these facts into such a context that they say everything about themselves, and he adds nothing of his own. It is right that science sees its ideal precisely in such a relationship to thinking. Goethe had this scientific ideal in mind in its fullest purity. Modern scientific thinking has not yet reached this purity. It leaves scientific ground when it advances beyond the world of phenomena and its forces to atomistic or energetic hypotheses.

But with such a kind of research one does not get to the soul-spiritual. For if you look at the world around you, everything you see must be a being of the senses. You come to nothing that could underlie it. And if you look inward, you see nothing but the external world as it is processed by the soul. This external world is, however, manifoldly transformed within. The impressions have passed through emotional experiences and will impulses. The imagination has transformed them. In this transformation they are incorporated into memory. The prudent person will still recognize what has been taken in from outside even in the transformation. He will not fall into the error of many a mystic, who mistakes for an inner revelation a completely different world, when it is only a reflection of the external world, transformed within.

False mysticism is one danger for anthroposophical spiritual research. It passes off memories that have been transformed as the knowledge of a supersensible being that manifests itself through the human being. From the clear insight into this fact, anthroposophy draws part of its means of knowledge. It does not stop at mere memory. It develops the soul in such a way that the faculty of memory itself is transformed. This is brought about by exercises that work as precisely in the inner activity of the soul as the physicist works externally when he makes his instruments to eavesdrop on nature's secrets. Certain ideas that are not brought in from memory are treated in the same way as remembered ideas. They have to be easily comprehensible ideas that one forms oneself or that one allows another to give one. It is important that nothing of the processes involved in ordinary remembering interfere with the mental activity to which one devotes oneself with such ideas. However, one does live completely in the activity that unfolds during remembering. It is now a matter of continuing such practice until one feels, so to speak, inwardly permeated by a being that makes the thinking power appear to be pulsating with life. In this way, thinking as a real process has been lifted out of the physical body. With ordinary thinking, one lives in the processes of the physical body. With the thinking that one has now attained, one lives in the etheric body. One has elevated into consciousness a process that otherwise takes place unconsciously through the physical body. One's own personal being has moved into the etheric body that has become conscious. We see the consequences. The past life since birth, which otherwise forms a subconscious stream from which the echoes of experiences emerge like waves in memory, either voluntarily or involuntarily, becomes in its entirety an immediate present experience. One feels oneself in it with one's I, as one otherwise feels oneself in one's physical body. Experiences that took place ten years ago are felt to be as much a part of oneself as the hand and the head. One experiences oneself in the etheric or formative body, but as if in a process. In this way one gets to know the ether, which forms spatially but is temporal in nature. One lives in images, but these are not static, they are mobile.

These images then merge with the physical being. One notices that one's consciousness has entered the realm of processes that work on the physical organs as the forces of nutrition, growth and reproduction. But one experiences all this in the same way as one experiences the activity of a sensory organ. One feels compelled to perceive the etheric being not as sharply distinguished from the external world, but as connected with the etheric external world, as one perceives the experience that occurs when the eye sees. Thus the etheric processes within will appear connected to etheric processes in the external world, as the perceptions within are connected to the external objects being looked at when seeing. The only difference is that in the ordinary process of seeing, fleeting thoughts arise for the inner being in the present moment, while in the etheric picture gazing it becomes clear how the etheric world actually works on the human organization inwardly.

But this experience is not like the ordinary life of memory. In the time when one is cognizing in this way, one lives only in pictures; and one sees this quite clearly. It would be an unhealthy element if one were to mistake the experiences for something other than pictures. One would then enter the region of illusion, hallucination, mediumistic imagination. This is a path that must not be taken. The reality that one erroneously senses in “dreaming”, in hallucination and the like, arises from the fact that the soul experience flows down into the physical, and from the physical it is given, as it were, the density of reality. For anthroposophical spiritual research, everything must remain in the realm of conscious life, and this knows that what it experiences is only images, as in memory images.

Reality must enter this world of images through further fully conscious exercises, not through unconscious physical processes. The next stage of practice lies in the development of an ability that one does not love in ordinary life. It is forgetting. First, you imitate memory by allowing images to be present in consciousness; you imitate forgetting by using full willpower to remove these images as if you had never had them. This makes you receptive to the perception of realities that are completely closed to ordinary consciousness. You take them into the etheric body like you absorb oxygen when breathing.

One can call the cognitive experience in images the imagination; the second stage, in which a spiritual-soul reality penetrates into the imagination, can then be called inspiration. Anyone who associates only what is described here with these names cannot possibly take offense at the fact that all kinds of evils have been attributed to the names of enthusiastic mystics.

Inspiration first leads to an understanding of the soul. In imagination, one lives in the soul, but one does not look at it. Only when one has freed oneself from imagination is one's own soul perceived by looking. Everything that lives in it as a thought is felt in the same way as hunger, as consuming one's own being; the will, on the other hand, is felt in the same way as satiety, as building up one's own being. The emotional experiences appear as the rhythmic back and forth between the two forms of feeling. In the will, a world comes to life that is not there for consciousness in ordinary life. If we want to understand it, we must reflect on our relationship to the will in our ordinary lives. We are familiar with the idea that this or that should be done. But we know nothing about the way in which the hand or leg is moved. We only see the movement, the unfolding of the will. What lies in between is as much immersed in darkness for consciousness as the processes from falling asleep to waking up. Into this darkness the spiritual shines. In the act of will, man, as it were, breathes in the spirit; in the activity of imagination, he breathes it out. The perception of being permeated with the spirit produces the feeling of satiation in the act of will; the activity of imagination is felt as a surrender of one's own being, as a consuming.

This opens up the possibility of educating oneself about sleeping and waking. During sleep, the soul sinks into the spirit. It then dwells precisely in the element that withdraws from its consciousness during will activity. It is in the world of the will, but outside the body. It is interwoven with the creative forces of the world. In wakefulness, it lives in the body, but the spirit that guides the will is not conscious of it. Its presence is limited to the sphere of the body. In inspiration, the will activity that is working in the body becomes visible. It is opposed in its nature to the external creative forces of the world. It consumes the body. Physically, there is a consumption, a breakdown of the body in the will. But these are felt precisely as saturation by the spirit. In the imagination, the body is created. Perception works in the same way as will; it destroys the physical. In the imagination that follows perception, the destruction is reversed. This is felt as an exhalation of the spirit.

From the experience of these inner processes of the soul, the path leads to an understanding of birth and death. Through birth, inspiration beholds the soul life that existed in the spiritual element before birth – or conception – as it will exist in the physical. The same applies to the soul life beyond death. In imagination, the personality is traced back to birth; in inspiration, it is pointed beyond. The life of the soul is thus recognized as an imagistic life during the time from birth to death. The external world can be reflected in the human being because he has suspended his soul life at the time of conception. It has poured itself out into the bodily life. New soul life is created in the experience of the external world.

Anthroposophy does not initially lead to life after death, but to life before birth – or conception. The consciousness of Western civilization has lost this focus on the prenatal life of the soul. Therefore, it denies the possibility of grasping immortality through knowledge at all. It would relegate the acceptance of immortality to the sphere of faith. It is right if it merely wants to develop an interest in life after death. But anthroposophy seeks knowledge in this area. It must develop interest in the other direction. Only when one has an overview of what part of the soul was present at the time of conception can one recognize how the soul shapes the body. In this knowledge, however, lies the other in relation to death. If the soul becomes a concrete reality for contemplation, then so does the transformation that the outer world undergoes in the soul through ordinary consciousness. One recognizes the lasting element in human life that has nothing to do with the body and that is led through death to the realm of the spirit.

What has been described as forgetting borders on the soul's capacity for love. It can therefore be brought to such an extent that what is conveyed through the body in love occurs as a pure spiritual experience. Then one perceives not only a uniting and separating of one's own being with the spirit, but a real standing within the spiritual reality. Inspiration becomes intuition. This level of knowledge can be given such a name because it has a similarity in a higher realm to what is called in ordinary life. Only there, intuition is an immediate awareness of a context that applies to the physical world, without logical mediation; intuition in the higher sense is the experience of the spiritual in such a way that what is imagined and inspired acquires objective validity, as if, by determining the weight of an object given to the eye in the image, it acquires objective validity.

In its own essence, the spirit is seen in the soul through intuition. And that is the one that returns in repeated earthly lives. Just as the soul exists only in the image during earthly life and has its reality in the prenatal, the spiritual does not even have an image in earthly life as I. It is only present there as a black circle within a white surface, or like the processes of sleep within life. What one addresses as “I” is a void for the ordinary consciousness. The real ego effects are the after-effects of previous earthly lives. The present ego can only develop its effects in the following earthly lives.

By living in the realization of the relationships between successive earthly lives, one arrives at an understanding of the relationship from spirit to spirit. The universe reveals itself as a spirit universe. The succession of earthly lives is a reflection of this spiritual universe. Therefore, intuition, which can see through this succession, can venture to penetrate to a certain degree into the spiritual essence of the world. In an act of will, the fulfillment of one's own nature with the spirit is seen. In an experience that is not indifferent to our will, but determines it in a fateful way, a spiritual emptiness appears, a longing. This is carried within us as a consequence of previous earthly lives. We build our lives out of such longings. Everything that is not done out of pure thought wells up out of this subconscious life-stream as fate. It is possible to will purely, because the etheric has come out of the etheric to the independent entity in man. As soon as one enters the realm of imagination, freedom is immediately lessened. There, everything proceeds consciously; one lives circumspectly. But one can only form images that lie within the laws of the etheric world. In the field of inspiration, one's soul is integrated into the general world of souls, just as one's physical soul is integrated into the breathing process. One experiences oneself as a part of the whole. And in intuition, everything in life that does not flow from mere thoughts is felt to be a fateful connection of repeated earthly lives. What is realized out of pure thoughts in freedom has only one reality in the one physical life on earth. For the following ones, it only has a meaning in that the person experiences inner satisfaction in accomplishing free actions. This consequence of freedom leaves inner traces that then show their effects in the following lives on earth.

Intuition offers the possibility of penetrating into the spiritual foundations of the universe. One experiences there, for example, the difference between the sun and the moon. One experiences this through observing their effect on human beings. Just as the outer world of the senses lives on in the human being as content for thinking and feeling, etc., so the sun and moon live on in growth and reproduction. The effect of the sun is seen in everything related to growth and will; the effect of the moon in decomposition and thinking. The effect of the sun in the human inner being conditions the ability to remember by exciting the inner being, whereby the outer sensory impressions are reflected. The effect of the moon conditions all devotion and love. It paralyzes and deadens the inner being. In this way, the human being is able to relive the outer world within himself.

Once one has been enabled in this way to recognize the deeper basis of the sun and moon effects, one's view can sharpen for what is sun- and moon-like in the earthly environment. For example, we see in plants both a tendency to break down and to build up. We see the moon-like quality in the solidifying of the substance, and the sun-like quality in the blossoming and sprouting. And we then recognize the relationship to the human organism. A plant that carries a certain salt is recognized for its healing effect on a pathological process in the human organism. Of course, today's medicine will reject such findings. It simply knows nothing of what can be recognized with such inner clarity through supersensible vision, as it is also present in mathematical thinking. For this vision, the human organism is different from that for physical research. And the beings of external nature are also different. One no longer perceives limited organs in the organism. Not lungs, liver, etc., but processes: the lung process, the liver process. And in the same way, one perceives not the plant but its formative process. This also makes it possible to judge the interaction of the one and the other process when they flow into each other through the administration of medication. One penetrates into the intimate relationships of the human being with his natural environment.

Life is brought to the historical assessment of human development through the means of knowledge of anthroposophy. One has tried to recreate the view of the historical process of becoming according to a beautiful scientific idea. This idea is known: that the human germ, before birth, passes through the forms in a shortened development, which are realized in stages in the animal series. Accordingly, it has been thought that a people at a later stage of culture can also be understood as representing a later age of the individual human being, so to speak. One looks at the ancient oriental peoples and sees humanity at the childhood stage in them. In the Greeks and Romans, one sees the youth stage captured. The more recently civilized peoples would then have entered into manhood. This view presents only a vague analogy. Through real observation, something quite different is found. When one reaches a certain age, one's intuitive perception is awakened to intimate soul processes that are, as it were, held back from unfolding in the physical body. It is like the human germ, which passes through the animal series in a rudimentary way, but is prevented from realizing the corresponding form at a certain stage. The body points to earlier stages of development as it grows; the soul does this at the end of life. In the older stages of human development, what is currently shown in the soul's rudiments was actually present in the human body. People were organized differently. At present, a clear parallelism between the physical and the soul-spiritual can be seen in the child and adolescent stages of life. One need only think of sexual maturity with its accompanying psychological phenomena. For a more subtle observation, such a parallelism is also still noticeable up to the end of the twenties. But then the physical processes become, so to speak, too firm to have such mental side effects. The mental and spiritual life emancipates itself from them and continues in dependence on education and the life experiences aroused by the outside world. This was different in earlier epochs of human development. In those times, the human being also developed spiritually and mentally simply by developing physically. The significance of this fact can be seen from the fact that, as a result, the human being not only participated in the ascending physical development with all his or her mental activity, as is the case now, but also in the descending one. Today, at most, he or she participates in the descending physical development only through what arises from it as mental decline. But if we are able to correctly assess the mental and spiritual rudiments just described, we come to the insight that in older epochs, especially in old age, people have attained a state of mind that meant a spiritualization of their entire being. That is why the views about a spiritual foundation of the world all come from older times. But this leads to a historical view according to which humanity records the culture that arises from physical development at ever younger stages. While the Greeks were still able to draw the strength for their spiritual culture from the development of their physical bodies in the first thirty years of their lives, the present-day civilized nations only manage to make use of their physicality until the end of their twenties. But this brings about an understanding of historical life that shows man his place in historical evolution. Great human tasks become apparent from history. One sees the necessity for humanity to deepen spiritually. For the time that began around the fifteenth century only developed what is possible in accordance with the development of the body until the end of the 1920s. These were the great achievements of the Galilean-Copernican age. Humanity would have to become rigid in them if completely different guiding forces of existence did not set in. Scientific life must be fertilized by the study of the supersensible. What man can experience through imagination, inspiration and intuition must be given to an existence that can no longer draw from the development of the physical. From the sense of human development, the emergence of an anthroposophical spiritual science appears as a necessity of the present epoch.

[Concept for the above text, from notebook 496, 1920/1921)

1.) Anthroposophy is seen as a fantastic attempt at knowledge. Taken as superstition. 2.) The enthusiasts take no pleasure in anthroposophy. 3.) It is difficult to speak of its essence in a nutshell. 4.) Du Bois-Reymond forbade to penetrate into the realm of the supersensible in a scientific way. 5.) Not opposed to science. 6.) The usual scientific method cannot penetrate into the life of the soul. Example Franz Brentano. 7.) Impossibility to go beyond the phenomena through external research. Hence the contempt for Oken-Schelling's natural philosophy. The ideas lose their content. 8.) But with such research, one also cannot approach the soul and spirit. The wrong path of false mysticism sees into the interior. But it only finds the reflection of the sensory outside world. 9.) In anthroposophical research, the ability to remember is transformed. Thoughts are absorbed into the etheric world. One detaches oneself from the body. 10.) One then lives in images. With full composure, one expands one's personality through one's experiences since birth. One has thereby become entirely a sensory organ. 11.) One must consciously remain in the soul realm. Slipping back into the body realm gives rise to dreams, hallucinations, etc. One then mistakes the pictorial-experiential for reality. 12.) One notices that one has entered the realm of body formation. One has taken the forces of growth up into consciousness. 13) One must now progress to supersensible perception. This happens through the process of imitation of forgetting. 14) One transforms the imagination into an inner power, which one then perceives just as little as the eye. But this power, which has flowed back into the inner being, opens up the vision of the soul's outer world. The astral aspect comes to the fore. The moments of waking up and falling asleep become representational. An interrelationship becomes visible that can be compared to breathing. Oriental wisdom therefore consciously transformed the breathing process. 15) In a further step, that which sends no impressions into consciousness during sleep is recognized as that which connects with the physical at birth (conception). This also passes through death. 16) You have thus come to an understanding of the interrelationship of your own human being with the outside world, but you have not yet grasped the spiritual outside world itself. 17) This happens through the further development of the method of forgetting. The power is trained in the soul, which otherwise works in dependence on the body as love. One thereby transfers one's own experience into that of another. The spirit reveals itself in its reality. The repeated lives on earth are recognized. 18) Intuition offers the possibility of seeing the inner world without false mysticism. And the outer world in its spiritual background. Just as ordinary soul experiences are an abstract reflection of the sensory outer world, so the material inside of a person is an effect of the spiritual content of the outer world. 19) This makes it possible to deepen medical knowledge. The natures of the natural kingdoms are seen through and their relationship to the organ processes of the human being is revealed. 20) The effects of the sun and moon are recognized. Their relationship to the inner processes of the human organization. 21.) Life is brought into the historical development of humanity. 22.) The artistic experience becomes conscious perception. This opens up a source for the artistic. Goethe spoke with a sense of what is entering the realm of experience. The unconscious is not affected. For one does not symbolize; one does not allegorize. One lives one's way towards artistic perception with insight. Dornacher Bau. Its forms arise from the same source as anthroposophy. — Eurythmy. 23.) Education is stimulated. A real knowledge of human nature is developed. From this arises the art of forming human beings. 24) Social conditions can be understood with a thinking based on anthroposophy. Natural science works with sharply defined contours towards a goal. Such ideas are not suitable for grasping the essence of capital, labor, money, etc. Such ideas can only be thought. They have no inner life. Anthroposophical ideas are alive. They connect with life. They become social sympathies and antipathies; they take hold of feeling and pulsate through will. They are absorbed into social life just as life forces are absorbed into the human organism. But that needs the present. 25) It was intellectualism that made natural science great. It will be supersensible vision that penetrates into life.