73. Clairvoyance, Reason and Science

In this lecture, I will discuss two products of the human mind: knowledge of nature and knowledge of the spirit. This touches on something that not only occupies the human intellect, but also has a profound impact on all of human life; it touches on an antagonism that has produced disastrous struggles in history, great disharmony in the coexistence of people, and the most tragic conflicts in the individual human soul. In this paper, we will discuss an attempt that is currently being made to clarify this issue. We will discuss the attempt that lies in the theosophical line of thought and research in the present day.

'Wherever science is mentioned in our time, one has a certain idea of the nature of science. Even if one or the other contemporary understands the concept in a slightly different way, the differences are not so great that one could not speak of a general agreement. It is required of science that its explanations can be the subject of objective knowledge at any given point in time and for any given person. Everything that is not asserted for the reason that things themselves tell us, but rather for the reason that it lies only in the subjective experience of the human being, is excluded from science, and in an especially strict sense from natural science.

If I now want to talk about the relationship between Theosophy and this natural science, I cannot assume an agreement in the same sense about the former term. It is therefore my responsibility to say what I will call Theosophy in my explanations. The name has been in use for many centuries. And it has always been applied more or less clearly to such knowledge that strives to penetrate into an area that concerns the spiritual, the supersensible starting points and backgrounds of natural phenomena and human existence through special sources of knowledge. Within the broad boundaries that this denotes, however, the concept of Theosophy varies among those who have used it. In my explanations, I will now speak of no other concept of Theosophy than one that assumes a very specific premise. It is the one that assumes that the power of knowledge is not exhausted with the abilities that present-day science applies. Rather, it asserts that through very specific activities that human beings undertake with their soul life, other abilities come to light through which the supersensible world can be opened up. It further asserts that only the development of such abilities can provide a truly experienced knowledge of the supersensible worlds, while everything that is gained only through inference from ordinary knowledge is to be referred to the realm of hypotheses. The assertion does not go so far as to say that the results provided by the assumed powers of knowledge are meaningless for all those who do not acquire these powers themselves. These powers are necessary only for research, not for testing the knowledge once it has been gained against the standard of logic and a properly guided sense of truth. Only those who are able to use their soul as an instrument in the manner indicated can arrive at such knowledge; and it must be clear and comprehensible to every sound sense of truth.

Certain circles speak of Theosophy in this sense, and whether rightly or wrongly, they have usurped this name for their endeavors. And in this sense, Theosophy will also be spoken of in this hour.

One need only repeat what has just been said and one can immediately encounter an apparently quite justified objection on the part of science. One can say that then Theosophy appeals precisely to a realization that depends entirely on the person himself, which is achieved precisely by the soul bringing itself into a certain state. Those who raise this objection fail to consider that the question is whether the soul cannot, through the preparations undertaken, attain a state that frees it from everything that science itself seeks to exclude. In that case, the soul's preparations for supersensible research would be a purely inner, subjective process, but not the state ultimately attained. This could then lead to insights in the same sense that the eyes of people lead to an agreement about colors, which is sufficient for the practice of life. But even those who are aware that different eyes see differently will not deny this agreement.

Now spiritual research provides methods for such training of the soul faculties, by which the required can be achieved.

I ask the honored audience to allow me for the time being as a mere assertion, which will find its justification in my further remarks. I assume that there is a second person in every human being, so to speak. And while the first is meant to be the one whom the senses see and the mind initially admits, the second is meant to be a conductor who is supersensible and far removed from ordinary thinking. And I ask you to understand that by this second person I do not mean something merely imagined, but a reality, even if a supersensible one.

What alone gives us the right to speak of such a second person? Nothing other than what also gives us the right to speak of the fact that hydrogen is contained in water. It would be quite inappropriate to speak of the absence of hydrogen in water if one were not able to separate hydrogen from water in the laboratory and present it as a separate entity. Is something similar possible in relation to two human beings? The fact that it is possible is precisely the result of spiritual research. In natural science, man recognizes that he has his two natures undivided in one another, just as hydrogen and oxygen are undivided in water. But it is possible to free the supersensible man from the sensual man in such a way that the former can be by himself, that he can enter into a contemplation of the world that does not make use of the tools of the second human being.

Now, man cannot, as it were, leap into such a state. He must start from the kind of knowledge he has in ordinary life. This is done by taking the first half of the leap, so to speak, by still retaining something of ordinary knowledge. The point is to initially suppress all attention and interest in the objects presented to the senses. Furthermore, all thoughts must be silenced. Through an intense effort of will, one must acquire the mental practice of being in an absolutely even inner state, undisturbed by any impression. The mistake usually made in this practice is that one has too little idea of it. The less one believes that one has already achieved the necessary with a certain state, the better it is. It takes a great deal of time and inner strength to achieve even a little in this regard. It must be expressly stated that the state one enters must have nothing of what could even remotely be described as pathological. And there is a great danger of crossing the safe boundary between healthy and morbid in such soul training. This is why certain schools of thought that make the methods of spiritual research compulsory for their followers do not talk about these things in public at all.

There is currently a tendency among scientists and doctors to consider anything that deviates from the norm as pathological.

In contrast, it cannot be emphasized enough that the soul training should not be considered a kind of mental training, in which the aim is to achieve a state of consciousness that is as close as possible to the state of consciousness of a healthy person.

The danger is very real that one crosses the safe boundary between healthy and morbid in such soul training. This is why certain schools of thought that make the methods of spiritual research compulsory for their followers do not talk about these things in public at all.

There is currently a tendency among scientists and doctors to consider anything that deviates from the norm as pathological There is currently a tendency among natural scientists and physicians to classify as pathological everything that deviates from the norm that is considered correct.

In contrast to this, it cannot be emphasized enough that all mental states achieved through the training methods referred to here do not represent a reduction but an increase in health. And only if the training is not carried out properly will the development take a course contrary to the right one. Of course, I cannot characterize in one hour all the individual soul functions that proper training brings about. For this many individual acts are necessary. A more exact idea of what is needed can be obtained from my book, which in the German edition bears the title “Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?” The French edition is entitled “L'Initiation”. - If a person now observes everything that is indicated there, and if he does not shy away from time, effort and self-denying moods, then he can achieve what can be described as a complete dwelling within the soul without any content from ordinary life. The essential point is that this is a state in which full consciousness of the soul is present, without the soul's content being there, which in ordinary life fills consciousness.

Once such a state has been attained, the task is to fill the emptied soul with content again. This must not be content taken from ordinary life. For such a content would lead the soul back into the realm it wants to leave. But where should another content come from? Here it comes into consideration what I just described when I said that the leap must first be made half way. The soul must bring it about through further intensive efforts of will, now as if out of the nothingness of the soul life, to fill itself completely with a powerfully effective idea. This must be a symbol that does not represent any external object or event, but one that symbolizes a meaningful thing. In this case, the symbol acts as something between an ordinary idea and a phantasm. It refers to something real; but it does not represent anything real. When one concentrates all that lives in the soul upon such a symbol, one draws the inner soul together into itself, as it were, and one frees oneself from that state in which one knows the inner man only through the instrumentality of the outer man. One gets to know the experience that consists in regarding the outer man as a being that, like other objects of the outer world, does not belong to us but belongs to the objective world. It may be said of this experience that some mystics come close to it, but do not fully attain it. The philosophical critics who have discussed the experience knew it only in this imperfect form. And that is why what they object to is justified from their point of view. They find that everything that can be gained from the experience can have a personal value for a person. They admit that through it he can feel as if he has been transported into a spiritual world. But they do not admit that through this experience one can gain spiritual knowledge that is quite independent of the personality. But one can only do so when the experience deepens to such an extent that one really feels like a kind of double being. One then sees one's own organism in a completely new form. In this form, it shows with all certainty all those characteristics by which one gives one's experiences a personal coloration in normal life. And in this way it becomes a teacher of truly impersonal knowledge. One need only look at him and say to oneself: “This is what makes things appear to you with this or that nuance of feeling.” In this way one is able to eliminate everything that is subjective. This important experience, which must precede every ascent to supersensible knowledge, bears the name in the language of esoteric science: “Encounter with the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’”. Since I am not speaking here of the path that leads man to act in the supersensible world, it is not incumbent upon me to describe in detail the terrible form that this “Guardian of the Threshold” shows to all those who want to come to such action. It is quite justified that the means by which this guardian of the supersensible worlds is approached in this field is not spoken of publicly. For the encounter with him is terrible and full of danger. It brings before the spiritual eye all the instincts, desires, passions, down to the lowest forms, of which man could only be capable if all the inhibitions that education, heredity, knowledge, social sense, etc. lend to life did not work. And since nothing counteracts the terrible spectre of one's own nature, there is a serious danger that man will not be able to escape the temptations and will head towards terrible moral decay. One only has to read the descriptions of those mystics who have taken a few steps into these dangerous worlds. What they describe of temptations and wild passions is completely true. The experiences one can have there are such that the usual descriptions of hell pale in comparison. It is well known that such mystics protect themselves from these temptations by striving for a complete annihilation of their personality before they enter these regions. They kill every feeling of their own, every will of their own. “It is no longer I myself who feel, no longer I myself who will, but it is Christ in me.” This attitude of Paul's becomes the ideal of these mystics. By sanctifying their whole inner being, they seek to escape the temptations of the same. For those who do not seek complete entry into the supersensible realm, but only the gaining of knowledge from it, the meeting with the ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ is less perilous. As already mentioned, only those reasons arise at the significant boundary that determine a person to see the world in a subjective way. Now, of course, these reasons are also terribly enticing. They are so strong that there is a danger that a person will lose all sense of anything other than what is personally sufficient for them as truth. He may then lose all sense of an impersonal form of truth in spiritual matters. This danger can be avoided if the one who ventures into the supersensible has first acquired a sound judgment and genuine critical faculty. These are the only things that can be taken from the ordinary world into the world of supersensible knowledge. In regard to the content of experience the two worlds are fundamentally different; but they are the same in this, that he who really thinks logically in the one world can also do so in the other. This thinking gives the spiritual researcher nothing that he could carry over into his new world. One does not learn the nature and facts of this world through concepts that one carries over from the ordinary world into it. They can only be known through observation, through direct experience. Yet this thinking is necessary for the reason that one should not lose touch with the old world when entering a new one. It is impossible for anyone in a supersensible world to distinguish hallucination or vision from reality who is not able to compare or measure his experiences in this world with those of the ordinary world. No matter how interesting the stories about the most wonderful and marvelous things in a spiritual world may be, no matter how much they may captivate attention. They are worthless for man's understanding of the world if one is unable to explain their relationship to the ordinary sense world in a logically satisfactory way.

The one danger into which man falls in his ascent into the supersensible world, and which has just been indicated, can also be described by saying: At the boundary between the two worlds, the tendency arises, indeed an almost irresistible urge, to mistake error for truth. He who cannot conquer this tendency becomes a visionary, a dreamer. He does not become a spiritual researcher. In the literary or philosophical world, which deals with these things outside of the theosophical world view, one knows nothing of the strict laws that the spiritual researcher imposes on himself after recognizing this danger. Therefore, it is quite understandable that everything he describes as true is considered by others to be nothing more than visions, hallucinations, etc. For outwardly, i.e. for those ideas that one can form without the characterized experience, they are nothing else. And a truly critical distinction between reality and appearance is only possible for those who have hardened their cognitive abilities in the fire through which they must pass when they have that experience.

All this, however, only points to one of the dangers of the supersensible path of knowledge. The other is that in the moment in which one has left one's ordinary organism, one is like a helpless child in the supersensible world. At first one only knows that one has become a different person: one does not know what to do now. Two cases can arise: Either one feels like being in an empty nothing. Then it is necessary to keep courage and composure. This is a sign that one has not yet sufficiently mastered the soul exercises of symbolic visualization. One is in a situation like a hungry person who has awakened a longing for a new world, but who is unable to satisfy this longing. To continue the exercises, one then needs great courage and self-confidence. If one cannot summon them up, one falls back into ordinary life; and one has gained nothing for it, but one has lost one's naive contentment and peace.

The other case is when, through the spiritual exercises undertaken, one has concentrated so much of the spiritual powers of the human being that they begin to show themselves as a spiritual organism. Then one is just like a helpless child. Perceptions arise before the spiritual field of vision that run in colorful interplay. But one does not know what to do with them. You now have to learn to orient yourself. This can only happen in a calm, serene inner soul life. It is the case that little by little the details that you experience form parts of an overall picture, that they give each other meaning. In this way, the spiritual field of vision is filled with images. It is a world of which one knew nothing before. The errors that arise when real seers describe this world stem from the fact that these seers have to use the words of ordinary language, which, after all, are only formed for the perceptions of the sensory world. They have to talk about sounds and colors. In truth, however, these are all only figurative expressions. But one should not say that it is therefore impermissible to use these expressions. On the contrary, it is entirely justified. For when the seer says, “I see red here and there,” he is aware that by using the word “red” he does not mean the red as seen by the eye when looking at a red cloth; but what he sees evokes in his soul an experience similar to the red of the cloth.

The supersensible picture presented to the seer in this way must be approached in a quite different way from the approach to the sense world. If one perceives something in the world of sense, it is sufficient for all practical purposes of life to take what one perceives for reality. No matter how clearly the idealistic philosopher may demonstrate that the sense picture of the dog is only an appearance, the man who stands in practical life must first of all hold fast to what he sees as a 'dog'. If we now were to do the same with regard to the supersensible picture just described, we should fall into the worst error. We must be able to say to ourselves: everything that lies in my supersensible field of perception is as yet nothing at all; it shows nothing real, but only images of the real. It is nothing; it only signifies something. We must be able to say to ourselves: everything you have before you is basically nothing but an illusion if you can't go any further. You have to be able to take a step forward now. But this step is basically nothing more than an expectation of what happens when you persist with calmness, self-confidence and presence of mind. I would like to illustrate this step with a comparison. It is as if you opened your eyes to the bright sun and were blinded, but then you could wait until your eyes had become hardened to look boldly at the sun. In this way, the inner spiritual man indeed hardens and strengthens. The images then become transparent and what they mean appears. Only now has entry into the supersensible world been accomplished. Only now can one experience its essence. For this reason, the supersensible world is called the imaginative world as long as it is a world of images. When it then opens up to reveal what it means, it is called the world of inspiration.

Only when one has reached this point does one stand face to face with the supersensible world. What the seer then perceives in this world can become the content of what is communicated to the world as theosophy. Whether or not this is accepted will depend on the attitude with which one faces life and ordinary science. One can be in such a frame of mind that one perceives the overpowering way in which the sense world reveals itself as the only reality. Then one will not at all be open to the subtle assurances of the seer or spiritual researcher with regard to everything he has experienced, in order to be able to distinguish between vision, hallucination, etc. and reality. One will dismiss his communications as visions, his spiritual mood as ecstasy in the popular sense. At best, one will accept them as personal mystical experiences that have nothing to do with objective science. Even if this is the case in many circles of the present day, and even with the vast majority of our contemporaries, it may also be said that there are many other circles that respond to the seers' statements because a natural sense of truth enables them to agree with the messages, and because life would seem full of contradictions to them if they were not to acknowledge that the world of the seer lies behind the ordinary world as a source and origin. People from these circles are the ones who devote themselves to the theosophical trend. They are people with deep spiritual needs, people who, through their inner longings, must ask themselves the question about the origin, meaning and goal of life. Often such people have sought refuge in the most diverse world views. And not only in search of knowledge, but also for a soul that must feel bleak and empty if it cannot look up to a higher world. After a long search, and unable to reconcile some of what they found with what they experience in happiness and misfortune, in suffering and pain, in memories and hopes, they have come to theosophy. And in its messages they find a structure of ideas that initially seems improbable, even unscientific, but which not only resolves otherwise insoluble scientific contradictions, but also harmonizes with life experiences in the most perfect way. With this sentence, I do not want to express a theoretical assertion, which may be debatable; rather, I want to point out a fact that many souls experience in the present.

What appears to be particularly significant, however, is that scientific thinking is also on the way to knocking on the doors behind which lies theosophy. I would like to point out a number of things that lie in a field in which today's so-called exact research and spiritual research will meet in the not too distant future. In the last few decades, a whole series of subtle thinkers have emerged who have found it necessary to break down the frameworks of old scientific views, especially in those areas where the ordinary scientist most strongly believes himself to be on safe ground. I must touch on some remote subjects here. Who would believe that there is anything more scientifically certain than the simplest theorems of geometry. And yet, in Lobatschewski and Bolyai, and also in Riemann, ingenious mathematicians have arisen who have conceived of completely different geometries than our own. These geometries have, so to speak, no application in our world. They would apply to beings that live in completely different worlds than we do. And these geometries are not fantastic in that their ideas correspond with each other and do not contradict anything other than our sensory world.

The astute mathematician Henri Poincaré, a member of the French Institute, has based an opinion on this that is significant in the highest sense. He sees in our ordinary geometry only a sum of views that actually apply to man for no other reason than because he finds them advantageous for finding his way around in his sensory world. And therefore Poincaré can see in this human sense world only one of many possible worlds. Now in this way nothing else can be shown than how many more worlds are conceivable than can be directly experienced. But one can see from this how science is on the way to breaking the fetters of the sense world, at least intellectually. The time will come when it will no longer be considered ridiculous to claim that the human soul is also capable of transcending its ordinary abilities to perceive worlds that Lobachevsky and Poincaré recognize as conceivable for the mathematical-physical mind.

Furthermore, I would like to point out how even the admirable natural science, with the significant advances of the descent theory, the reformed Lamarckism and Darwinism, stands at a point from which a bridge is possible to spiritual science in the theosophical sense. It is well known how this science has presented a developmental series before the observing human being. It begins with simple beings, which develop ever higher and higher through differentiation of the organs. Adaptation to living conditions and the struggle for existence are said to play a role in this, through which the lower is transformed into the higher. Today, there are already numerous scientific thinkers who find it particularly difficult, in the individual results of research, to really bring the development of higher forms from lower ones to mind in concrete terms. It is not so long ago that bold naturalists enthusiastically constructed the entire developmental series of organisms and proudly presented humans as the final link in the evolution of the animal creatures that were closest to them. Today, under the oppressive burden of the facts, great caution has been adopted in this area. And there are more and more researchers who consider it necessary to hypothetically consider creatures in the distant past that had neither anything of today's humans nor of the highest animal organisms. I need only refer to research such as that of the successful Selenka to suggest the tremendous perspectives that open up here. Natural scientists are increasingly coming to realize that pure fact-finding is more likely to raise countless questions than to solve them by their methods.

What does spiritual research have to say about all this? The seer is able, by means of the methods that have been described, to look into the most distant past. And the spiritual essence of what he sees becomes all the richer the poorer it becomes in relation to what is accessible to the senses. He finds that the natural scientist is right when he imagines the earth in its primeval state as being inhabited only by simple material life, but that the spiritual world is becoming ever richer. He finds an original, entirely spiritual state of being on earth. But man already existed in this spiritual state as a spiritual-soul being. Indeed, he existed as such before other organisms were present. In ancient conditions we are dealing – my description can only be an approximation on this point – with the spiritual-soul man. And the present state of humanity is only a condensation of the ancient soul-spiritual form of man. That man has come to his present sensual-real form is due to the fact that he has gone through the transition into it at a relatively late time on earth. The various animal forms have arisen because their corresponding spiritual primal beings came to earthly densification earlier. As a result, they remained at more imperfect levels, which man has progressed beyond. Thus, through the seer's observation, an upward expansion of the theory of evolution is given. And this is in such a way that no results of natural science are disregarded. All the achievements of so-called positive research can be done justice to precisely because of this. And anyone who wants to see can already see how the two streams of research, the natural scientific and the seer's, will meet in this field in the near future. It can already be seen how the thinking of the present is pushing towards this. It is only necessary to draw attention to a thinker like Henri Bergson. Bergson finds that all the paths of research that science has taken since Galileo require a supplement. He finds this supplement in a certain intuition. And in this, Bergson even goes some way towards meeting theosophy. In his mind's eye he sees a complex primeval human being, which in its further development has become man. And the animal kingdom in its forms, and even a part of the plant kingdom, seem to be like the splintered debris of the progressive human stream of development. All this is abstract intuitive thought in Bergson. He does not take the step into theosophy. But it will be taken one day. For what Bergson constructs only in thought, presents itself to the seer's observation in a perceptible form, quite concretely in its development, just as the individual stages of human life present themselves to sensory observation as childhood, youth, maturity, old age.