140. About Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy enters modern life as an uninvited guest. It will only be treated kindly when it is noticed that it brings something “lost”.
Man has possessed it instinctively. He must consciously attain it. What anthroposophy brings is still too difficult for people. They do not want to apply the self-activity that is necessary.
The two most important questions have disappeared from soul contemplation: the eternal and freedom.
They are even lost in the life of the body. If an immortal element were present in the life of the body, it would have to act like the air that is in the body. This immortal element must, as it were, be exhaled when the mortal element begins its existence. It is inhaled again at death.
Only the spirit of man, independent of the body, possesses freedom. Natural science is right when it recognizes no freedom.
Anthroposophy must resort to a different kind of knowledge than is usual. This puts it in a position of being confused with the lower so-called clairvoyance. But this is bound to organ systems, in relation to which sensory perception is a “higher” one.
In sensory knowledge, the human being actually goes beyond “himself”. He is present as a “spirit” in a region where he is not present as a “soul”.
He must go further beyond himself. He must develop a “knowledge” to which there is no ordinary “being”. The first stage [is] “imaginative” knowledge. This “knowledge” will necessarily appear to ordinary consciousness as fantastic. In the moment in which this knowledge touches ordinary reality, it will be destroyed by it. In the life of the body, the human being sleeps through his immortal life. Waking up, he seizes hold of it.
The threefold nature of the human being on both sides.
Death on the outside - from the inside. - Violent death. - Changes in direction in earthly life. - Post Mortem destructive in earthly life. - Presence of mind.
Supernatural knowledge has all the qualities that man does not love, while he desires the object.
Man dreams and sleeps “awake” - for only the life of imagination is really “awake,” and this bears the guilt of its being awake with dead content that can only be applied to the mechanical. Its content can only be the life of nature. The aim of knowing nature is to free the human being.
The experience of feeling is dream-like. The experience of the impulses of the will is asleep. - The ordinary dream is counterfeit. It bears the stamp of the past.
If one were always awake, the sense of “I” would disappear. If one were to see through the wanting in ordinary consciousness, one would be a “different” one.
Both social and historical becoming is dreamed.
What can be reduced to concepts in it is already a historical corpse.
Events do not follow one another in such a way that one can be explained by what has gone before; rather, each sheds light on the next independently.
What is dreamt up cannot be brought into the forms of ordinary consciousness. A parliament of scientifically minded people would ruin the world. Parable of chess.
- Visions that are true to reality because they are rooted in life. The most dazzling example of a social science is socialism itself. It is not a program for the future; it is the conceptualized social dream development of the last few centuries. Marx told the dream and believed in its sense of real reality. But that was at the moment when one must recognize that awakening is taking place. Mauthner speaks of Hegel's “impudence”: “All that exists is reasonable.” The present awakening must not lead to a new dream, but to an imaginative recognition of the social laws. Everything that is scientifically based must be discarded. We must smile at political theories as we would at an esthete who invents the laws of opera.