Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 23 November 1911, Berlin

The Hidden Depths of the Soul

When an earthquake strikes in any region, when the earth itself trembles beneath people's feet, most people who experience such an event feel a certain fear and anxiety, a sense of dread. If we examine the causes of such a feeling of dread, we find that they are mainly to be sought in the fact that we can say that human beings are not only confronted with the unknown, with something that comes from somewhere without them being able to explain it to themselves properly, without having expected it, but rather that this feeling of dread stems from something else, from the sensation that people have at that moment, while the event is still ongoing, of how far it might go and what else might happen from the unknown depths.

Such a feeling, even if people may not always recognize it in everyday life, can often arise in relation to what lies in the depths of the soul, beyond all conscious existence, all conscious imagination and feeling, and which sometimes emerges from the hidden depths of our souls like an earthquake. What emerges there in terms of drives, desires, but also inexplicable moods and inhibitions of being, what often intervenes in our conscious life as destructively as an earthquake, almost always confronts human beings, no matter how much they believe they know themselves, with the vague expectation: What else might emerge from the underground of my soul? — For the person who delves a little deeper into their nature soon realizes that all the imaginative life that takes place in consciousness, namely that which dominates them from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep, — is like the waves rippling on the surface of the sea, but whose power to rise up, even the way they play, must first be traced back to depths unknown to ordinary perception. So it is with human imagination. That alone should give pause to those who, time and again, raise objections from what they call external empirical science to the descriptions given here in these lectures from the perspective of spiritual science. If spiritual science is compelled to see in human beings something more complex than the simple creatures we so often want to see, then life itself could serve as external proof of this complexity of human nature, which human beings can perceive every day.

Spiritual science must not only conceive of human beings as composed of what the outer eye initially sees, or what external anatomical and physiological science can perceive and dissect in human beings, and what can be mastered by scientific methods, but spiritual science must also contrast everything that can be determined and mastered by external perception and external science i.e., the physical body of the human being, with its higher, supersensible members. It must be said that these can only be perceived through the kind of knowledge that has already been outlined here in the lecture on “Death and Immortality” and others, and which will be discussed further in the lectures that follow. Here, spiritual science must contrast the physical body, which can be perceived through external observation, with those research results that cannot be obtained in the sensory world, but are only accessible to what can rightly be called clairvoyant consciousness. — let us not be offended by a word that is only meant to serve as a designation, like any other — what we might call the etheric body or life body as the next supersensible member of the human being.

And if spiritual science stands strictly on the ground of external science, that such forces and substances are found in the physical body of the human being which are also present in his physical environment and are just as effective in this physical body as in the physical environment, spiritual science must also emphasize that the true effectiveness of these physical forces and substances only really comes into play in the physical human body after the human being has passed through the gate of death, while throughout the entire lifetime that the human being spends in the physical world, these forces and substances are enclosed in the higher forces of the etheric or life body, which is, as it were, the fighter against the decay of the physical forces and substances that occurs immediately when, at the moment of death, the etheric body detaches itself from the physical body of the human being. As we will soon see in today's reflection, it is by no means a paradox, in view of the true experience of life in all its aspects, to speak of such a higher body of the human being in contrast to the physical body, for in life, separations are evident everywhere, the duality of the human being is evident everywhere, insofar as he has this physical body, which contains everything that the rest of the physical environment has, and insofar as this physical body is structured by the etheric body or life body.

But then this spiritual science must be clear that everything that takes place within our conscious life must be sharply contrasted with all that remains active and powerful in human beings even when consciousness is extinguished, as in the case of sleeping people in normal life. For it would be logically absurd to claim that everything that takes place from the morning, when the human being wakes up, in terms of drives, desires, imaginations, and ideas in the ebbing and flowing life of the soul throughout the day, arises early in the morning with waking up and disappears without a trace every evening with falling asleep. In what we see in the human being before us when sleep has come, we have before us the physical body and everything that sustains it in the physical world, that is, the physical body and the etheric or life body, but we have strictly separated from this what we now call the astral body, the actual bearer of consciousness phenomena. Within this, however, which is the carrier of consciousness phenomena, we must, if we want to understand the soul life correctly, again distinguish between what is, so to speak, continually under our control, what can be continually dominated by the power of our inner thought life and our will decisions. We must sharply distinguish it from what could be said to rise up from the subterranean depths of soul life and give our soul life its temperament, coloring, and character, but over which we have no power, and which is nevertheless not controlled by us. So we must distinguish between all that which fills our soul life in the broader sense, which actually lives in us continuously from our earliest childhood days to our oldest days, which makes us gifted or ungifted, good or evil, which makes us human beings who have an aesthetic sense and a feeling for beauty or who have no sense of beauty, but which is not connected with we can think of as being enclosed by our intellectual consciousness, our world of feelings, and our world of will: we must distinguish it from our other conscious soul life. Therefore, when we speak in terms of spiritual science, we first distinguish between two parts of our soul life: an expanded or, as has become customary in recent times because it can no longer be denied, a subconscious soul life and that which is our conscious soul life, which already plays into what we control with thoughts, impulses of the will, and judgments of taste and other kinds.

Whatever one may think about other necessities of dividing the human being into these four parts of his being, one must at least admit that it is necessary for the consideration of life, because experience speaks in favor of first distinguishing these four parts of the human being. If one approaches what life offers in an unbiased and open-minded way, one will find evidence everywhere for what has just been said from the perspective of spiritual science, and which may initially sound like an assertion. This becomes particularly apparent when one examines the more detailed evidence provided by spiritual science. Above all, one finds that spiritual science, based on its findings, must attribute to the etheric or life body not only those forces that permeate the organism internally, so that it becomes a mere physical structure that is the carrier of our soul life. We find in this etheric body not only these organizing forces, but we also find, as the results of spiritual science show, everything that we must count as our memory, everything that constitutes our recollections. For it is not within what has been called the astral body that we should seek the bearer of memory, but in the etheric body, which is less closely connected with our soul life and more closely connected with the physical body, to which it is so strongly bound in ordinary life that it remains with it even when, in ordinary life, the human being leaves the physical body with the ego and the astral body and sinks into the subconscious, as in sleep. Thus, in the sense of spiritual science, we must seek memory and everything we carry within us, but which we do not always have really present in our consciousness, but must bring up from the hidden depths of our soul life, in an etheric body underlying our physical body. If this is the case, then one would have to assume, if there were justification for thinking of the etheric body as the bearer of memory in a certain relationship independent of the physical body, that it would have to prove its independence in ordinary life, for example, the independence of memory from the physical body.

If the assumptions of spiritual science just characterized are to be correct, what would then have to be revealed in relation to how we connect with the outer world, how our ego takes in the conscious impressions of the soul life, of the outer world? In relation to all this, as human beings in the physical world, we must first of all rely on our sense organs, which are external physical organs, and on our intellect, which is bound to the instrument of the brain. Therefore, we can say that everything that human beings have as their worldview, as the sum of what they live in everyday consciousness, is bound to the outer body, to the health and sickness of this outer body, but above all to healthy, well-developed sense organs and a well-developed brain. — Is it right to say that what lies within us, as in the hidden depths of our soul life, and what can only be brought up through memory, that is, to memory, is not bound to the outer organization to the same extent as conscious everyday life, but rather rests more within, below the threshold of what is bound to the senses and the instrument of the brain? Is there anything that justifies speaking of the independence of memory? If there is, then one could also say with some justification that within what is physical body organization, the etheric body of the human being has an independent existence, an existence that can be internally undamaged because it is independent of external damage to the body organization. The question we can ask about life is an interesting one: Do the ordinary processes of consciousness, in which we are bound to the health of the brain, run completely parallel to the processes of memory, or does memory in a certain sense take on an independent existence, so that when the physical body can no longer be the bearer of perceptions, memory proves to be independent? Let us ask life what answer it has. This brings us to a remarkable fact that anyone can verify because it can be found in literature. All things in spiritual science are first brought forth from clairvoyant consciousness. But then they are initially hypotheses for other people. However, life can be questioned about what is presented as a result, whether it can be proven by life itself.

A personality known to all for his tragic fate shall be cited as an example: Friedrich Nietzsche. After the final catastrophe had been long in preparation during his illness, he experienced the rapid onset of insanity, was picked up from Turin by his friend Overbeck, who was then a professor in Basel and died a few years ago, and was initially brought to Basel under difficult circumstances. Now, Bernoulli's interesting book tells us the following. I will skip over the individual episodes of the transfer from Turin to Basel and focus only on the fact that particularly struck Overbeck. Nietzsche had no particular interest in what was going on around him, and what fell within the sphere of his ordinary consciousness, he hardly paid any attention to or made any effort to engage with what was happening. He also allowed himself to be taken to the hospital, where he met an old acquaintance who was also the director of the hospital. When Nietzsche, who had lost all interest in the outside world, heard his name, something stirred within him, and to the great astonishment of his friend Overbeck, he immediately began to continue a conversation he had had with this doctor many years before. He picked up exactly where he had left off seven years earlier! His memory worked so faithfully, while the instrument of external perception, the brain, the mind, and ordinary consciousness were destroyed, that he passed by indifferently and inattentively what he could have perceived and should have observed if everything that belongs to everyday consciousness had remained faithful to him. Here we see clearly how, in contrast to the destroyed organism, that which we must now rightly attribute a certain independence to continues to function. But let us go further. Here, in an experiment that nature itself has presented to us in such a faithful manner, we can recognize how things stand, if only we have the ability to observe them from all sides. When Nietzsche was transferred to Jena and Overbeck and others visited him, it also became apparent that one could talk to him about everything he had researched and experienced in earlier years, but never about what was happening around him in the immediate present, the observation and perception of which is bound to that for which the physical body is the instrument. On the other hand, what in spiritual science must be called the independently functioning etheric body, which is the carrier of memory, had remained present in an independent manner and to a high degree. And one could now add countless examples to this one. Certainly, it is true: those who want to think in a thoroughly materialistic way can say that certain parts of the brain remained intact, which are precisely the carriers of memory. But anyone who makes such an objection will soon see that it does not hold up in the face of real experience, of unbiased observation of everyday life. Thus, we see, as it were, the etheric body or life body standing behind the physical body, which we recognize through spiritual science as the bearer of memory.

When we look at the human being from another perspective, from the perspective of their inner life, we see that in everyday life they really become aware of how waves rise up from unknown depths, of which they are otherwise not as conscious when they survey their soul life as they are of what they control with their intellect, feelings, and impulses of will. Among the things that show us how unknown depths from our soul, insofar as this soul is broader than our consciousness, work their way up into consciousness, is the dream life, which has already been mentioned here and is so important for the overall understanding of the human being. Dreams, in their chaotic nature, in their ebbing and flowing, which seems completely lawless, they nevertheless have a subtle inner, intimate regularity, and, as we shall see in a moment, they are something that plays out in the subconscious regions of the soul and, as it were, only breaks through, touches the upper regions, but cannot be forced under the control of the human being. It is never my intention in these lectures to present anything that is merely imagined, but only, as is done in the natural sciences, what is borrowed from life, experience, or spiritual-scientific experimentation. The fact that there is a science of dreams, just as there is physics and chemistry, is hardly known to people in wider circles, but this science of dreams has brought to light countless things that exist in the hidden depths of our soul life. Let us first recount a very simple dream, which may seem strange to us, but which is characteristic of those who want to penetrate deeper into the hidden depths of the soul.

A farmer's wife once dreamed that she was on her way to town and on her way to church. She dreams very precisely how she arrives in the city, how she enters the church, how the preacher stands in the pulpit and preaches. She clearly hears the clergyman's sermon. She found it wonderful how fervently and deeply the clergyman preached. But what made a particularly deep impression on her was how the clergyman spread his hands. This gesture of the indefinite, which makes an even deeper impression on many people than the definite, made a very deep impression on the woman. Then something remarkable happened. In the dream, the preacher's appearance and voice suddenly changed, and finally, after the dream had gone through many intermediate phases, it became apparent that nothing remained of the preacher's beautiful earlier words. He no longer spoke as he had before, but his voice had changed into the crowing of a rooster, and he himself had become a rooster with rooster wings. The woman wakes up: outside the window, the rooster is crowing!

This dream shows us many things when we examine it closely. First of all, it shows us that we cannot rely on ordinary concepts of time when we want to explain the dream. What concepts of time express when we look back on our waking life cannot be considered authoritative for the dream. For it is undoubtedly clear, as you will understand from your own dream experiences, that the dreamer must have thought the dream extended over a long period of time, because she dreamed how she walked step by step to the city, how she entered the church, how the preacher climbed into the pulpit, how she listened to the sermon, and so on. In the physical world, this would take a long time. The rooster certainly did not crow for that long. But she woke up because of the crowing of the rooster. What the crowing of the rooster triggered in the woman's soul life complements the receding dream image, the dream images. She looks back on a world she believes she has lived through. This world is filled with images borrowed from her ordinary life. But the trigger, the external cause—the crowing of the rooster—happened quickly. If we look at it externally, we would get a time as the cause for what the woman experienced in her soul, which would be very short in relation to the time over which the woman thinks her dream experiences extend.

If spiritual science tells us that from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, human beings are not in their physical and etheric bodies, but are outside of them with their astral bodies and their egos in a world that is not visible to the outer eye, that is supersensible, then we must concretely imagine that this woman was torn out of this life by the crowing of the cock. It would be a completely unfounded idea if people were to think that they do not have experiences in the world in which they are from falling asleep to waking up, just as they do in the physical world. But these experiences must be purely spiritual in nature. As the woman wakes up, the crowing of the cock plays into her awakening, and as she wakes up, she looks back on what she has experienced. We must not regard the images she experiences, everything that her dream makes her believe, as something she really experienced during her sleep, but we must regard it in such a way — only then can we come to terms with the whole phenomenon of dream life — that the woman is actually not able to look into what she experienced until the morning, until the moment of waking up. But when the moment of awakening approaches, the clash between sleep life and waking life makes it clear to her that she has experienced something, not what she has experienced. And this causes her to insert into her sleep life images that are now symbolic, allegorical experiences from her daily life. It is as if the woman combines something she has often seen in daily life into images, places them there, and thereby covers her sleep experiences. Therefore, what appears as the passage of time is not what actually happened, but these ideas, which are pushed in front of sleep life like a curtain, appear in their own passage of time with the time that the images must have if they are to be experienced as external physical perceptions. We must therefore say that in many respects the images of dreams are more a concealment, a veiling of what a person experiences in sleep than a revelation of it. It is important to note that although the dream world is something that happens through the images that people themselves place before their sleep life, it is not a reflection of what happens, but only points to something that is experienced in sleep. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the dreams people experience vary greatly depending on their soul life. A person who is tormented by this or that from their daily activities or by a guilty conscience will have different dream images than someone who, during their sleep, can immerse themselves in what their soul can take with it into the supersensible world in terms of satisfaction and bliss about something accomplished in a favorable sense or about things that make their life meaningful. The qualities, not the experiences themselves, indicate that they are something that takes place in the hidden depths of the soul. In particular, however, the dream becomes a betrayer of the hidden depths of the soul when we see it occur in the following way. Let us consider a dream that I have already mentioned here in relation to other things as a betrayer of the hidden depths of the soul. The following dream recurred rhythmically and periodically in a person, inspired by an experience in their youth.

When he was still a student, the person in question had demonstrated a certain talent for drawing; for this reason, his teacher had given him a particularly difficult drawing to do just as he was about to leave school. While the student usually copied several drawings in a certain amount of time, he was unable to finish this one in a whole year because he was so meticulous about the details, so he drew and drew and could not finish. Thus, the decisive end of school approached, and only a relatively small part of the work, to which much else would have had to be added, had been completed. One can imagine that the student, knowing that he would not be able to finish his work, experienced a certain amount of anxiety or fear. But this anxiety he experienced at the time was nothing compared to the anxiety that now regularly reappeared as a dream experience after a certain number of years! After a number of years during which the dream had not appeared, the person in question dreamed that he was still a student, that he was unable to finish his drawing, and that he was becoming anxious about it. The anxiety experienced in the dream grew greater and greater until he awoke. And once the dream had appeared, it might repeat itself after a week. Then the dream would not appear again for years, would come back, repeat itself after a week, then disappear again, and so on, very often.

One can only understand this strange dream experience by looking at the rest of this person's life. As a student, the person in question had a certain talent for drawing, which developed gradually throughout his life, in stages, step by step. If one observed closely, it always became apparent that this person made progress in his ability to draw and was able to do more each time after such a dream experience had preceded it and announced the increase in his drawing skills. So that one could always say: the dream experience occurred, and afterwards this person felt in a very special way imbued and permeated with greater abilities to express themselves through drawing. — This is an extremely interesting experience that can play into the factual world of a person. How can spiritual science explain such an experience?

If we take as our starting point what has already been said in the last of these lectures, namely that the human being has a supersensible central core that is constantly working on the transformation of inner forces but also on the transformation of the outer physiognomy, if we take into account that such a central core of being exists as a supersensible entity in the human being and underlies him, then we will have to say: Throughout life, this central core of being in human beings works on their physical instrument, on their entire organization, because this is necessary if one wants to continually develop new abilities that are connected, so to speak, with external skills. — This central core of being worked on the physical organization in such a way that the human being became increasingly skilled and increasingly receptive to forms, to everything that constitutes the ability to grasp something visually and express it in a form.

The central core of being works within the human body. As long as this inner core works within the body, as long as its activity pours into the body, it cannot rise into consciousness. All its powers are poured into the transformation of the body's organization, which then manifests as abilities — in this case, drawing. Only when a certain stage is reached and the human being is reorganized in such a way that he can bring this reorganization into consciousness, when he becomes capable of consciously exercising his newly acquired abilities, only at the moment when his central core of being rises into consciousness can the human being know what is happening within him, what is working down there in the hidden depths of his soul life. But in our case there is a transition. When human beings are still completely unaware that, in times when they are not making external progress, the central core of their being is working on their drawing abilities, everything remains down in the hidden depths of their soul life. But when the time comes for the central core of the being to rise into consciousness, this becomes noticeable in the peculiar dream experience, which takes this form because it is meant to announce that the inner core of the being has reached a certain conclusion with the drawing abilities. Thus, this “dream” is always proof that something has been achieved. Until the dream occurs, the soul forces have been working in the hidden depths of the body to gradually crystallize the ability. But then, before these powers can reveal themselves through consciousness, after they have hardened to such an extent and the physical organization is ready for this ability, another transition is created. At first, it does not fully enter consciousness, but pours into the semi-consciousness of the dream. Through the dream, the hidden aspects of the soul life break into the conscious parts of the soul life. Therefore, after the dream, the human being always progresses in relation to this ability, which is so characteristically expressed symbolically in the dream.

Thus we see how the central core of the human being can work down in the foundations of the sensory and supersensory organization of the body, but then we see that when the human being has brought it to a certain degree of consciousness, and the inner core of the being is nearing completion with its work, how it then expresses itself in a dream experience and this activity transforms itself into the forces that appear in conscious life. Thus we have a correspondence between what is below and what takes place above in conscious life, and we also see why so much cannot rise up into conscious life, because that which the human being still needs in order to develop the organs so that he can transform the abilities that must then become the tools for conscious life cannot rise into consciousness. So we can say that throughout life we can observe how the central core of the human being works on the organism. When the human being gradually develops during childhood, from the inside out, it is the same inner core of being that works on him before the ego consciousness enters, up to the point in time that the human being can later remember, the same core of being that continues to work on him later. The whole being of the human being is in a state of constant transformation. What the human being experiences in his or her soul life is sometimes experienced in such a way that he or she is unaware of it, but it is creatively active within him or her; sometimes it ceases its creative activity, but instead rises into conscious activity. This connection exists between what we have in the upper regions of consciousness and what rests in the subconscious, in the hidden depths of our soul life.

These hidden depths of the soul often speak in such a way that they truly speak a completely different language, unfold a completely different wisdom than what humans can even dream of in their upper consciousness. We can conclude that human consciousness should not be thought of as coinciding with what we call the reason of things, which human consciousness mirrors, as it were, from the fact that rational activity, the working of reason, also confronts us where we cannot accept illumination by reason in the same sense as is the case with humans. If we compare humans with animals in this respect, we find that humans do not have an advantage over animals in terms of rational activity, but rather in terms of the different illumination of this rational activity through consciousness. When we see the beaver or the wasp building, we see in what the animals accomplish — we can survey the entire horizon of animal creativity — that reason is at work there, and that it is basically the same reason that humans apply when they illuminate a piece of this rational activity in the world from their consciousness. Humans can only illuminate a part of the rational activity of the world from their consciousness, but a much more comprehensive rational activity pervades our subconscious soul life. Not only are the subconscious conclusions and conceptualizations carried out by reason, as even a natural scientist like Helmholtz has pointed out, but without human involvement, artful, wise things are accomplished by reason.

I would like to refer here to a chapter that I have already alluded to, which I would like to call “On the Philosopher and the Human Soul,” in which I am thinking in particular of those philosophers who were predominantly pessimistic in the nineteenth century. The philosopher deals primarily with what we call reason, conscious intellectual activity, and he allows nothing else but what he can examine with his intellect. If we take philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Mainländer, and Eduard von Hartmann, we find that they start from the idea that, in contrast to what man knows by being able to survey the world with his manifest soul life, evil, pain, and suffering far outweigh joy and happiness. And Eduard von Hartmann conducted an interesting mathematical experiment in which he showed in a truly ingenious way how pain and suffering predominate in the world. He summarized in a subtrahend everything that humans must experience as suffering and pain, and presented as a minuend everything that humans can experience as joy and happiness. When he subtracts suffering and pain from happiness and joy, pain and suffering prevail in his calculation. So the philosopher, based on a mental operation, naturally says with a certain degree of justification: if pain and suffering prevail in the world, then life can really only be viewed pessimistically. — The intellect thus performs this calculation in the philosopher and, based on conscious life, comes to the conclusion that the world must be regarded as bad to a certain extent.

Now, in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” I pointed out that this calculation of the intellect, this “subtraction,” is not applicable at all. For who performs it, even if it is not the philosopher, but the human being in life? Always the obvious, conscious life of the soul. But strangely enough, the conscious, obvious life of the soul does not determine the value of life and pleasure in existence. For that is what life shows us again. No matter how much a person performs such a calculation, he does not conclude that life has no value. From this, we must know—I said earlier that Eduard von Hartmann's calculation is ingenious and correct—that when a person performs this calculation, he cannot draw any conclusion from it in his conscious life. Robert Hamerling already expressed the idea in his “Atomistik des Willens” (Atomism of the Will) that there must be something wrong with this calculation, because in every living being, including humans, even if pain predominates, there is still pleasure in existence, not pleasure in the destruction of existence. So humans do not draw the conclusion from the subtraction example, but from something else, that life does have value after all. Now, in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” I have proven that the subtraction example is not applicable because the soul life of humans performs a completely different calculation in its depths. Not a subtraction example: that would be performed by consciousness. The subconscious soul performs a division: it divides the amount of pleasure by the amount of suffering, of pain. Now you all know that if you subtract—assuming the amount of pain is equal to eight and the amount of pleasure is also equal to eight—the result, i.e., the value of existence in this case, would be equal to “zero.” But if you don't subtract, but divide, the calculation would be: eight divided by eight equals one. You still get one as the result, not zero. And so, even if the denominator is very large, as long as it is not “infinite,” the result is still a pleasure in existence. Humans perform this division in the hidden depths of their souls, and what then emerges as the result and becomes conscious is what humans perceive in their conscious, revealed soul life as the value of existence, as the value of pleasure. I have demonstrated at that point that the peculiar phenomenon of human beings, who, even when they otherwise enjoy only a healthy nature, still have a joy in existence, a joy, a desire for the world, even in the face of far greater pain, can only be understood by the fact that they carry out in the depths of their souls what we can then clarify scientifically as an example of division.

Thus we see how the soul is a calculator in its depths, and how life in the open shows that man has ruling reason in his subconscious. As in the beaver, for example, when it builds, reason reigns that does not reach up into the animal consciousness at all, about which it cannot consciously account, or as is the case with the wasp, so reason reigns in the depths of the human soul and, like the force in the sea that drives the waves upward, penetrates into consciousness, which is a much smaller circle in existence than that which is present in the wide horizon of soul life. There we become aware of how human beings must view themselves as floating on the sea of soul and consciousness life, and how only a part of their soul life is actually illuminated by consciousness, which floats with their higher consciousness in the subconscious.

We can also see in everyday life how human beings are repeatedly reminded of what is going on deep within them, and how this makes life different for one person or another in relation to external events. In the depths of our souls, without our being aware of it, things can be at work that we experienced long, long ago, that we have forgotten in our outer consciousness, but which nevertheless continue to have an effect. These reveal themselves to the spiritual researcher as continuing to exist in the central being of the human being and as effective, even if they do not come into action according to the pattern of consciousness. The following case may occur. There may be something deep within a person's soul that they experienced as a child and that affected them deeply. We know that as children, human beings can be particularly sensitive to perceptions of injustice in their environment. Let us now assume that in their seventh or eighth year, after doing something, the child experienced an unjust assessment by their parents or other people in their environment. Later in life, conscious soul life can then superimpose itself on this like a surface layer. It may be forgotten by the conscious mind, but it is not ineffective for the unconscious depths of the soul. Let us assume that such a child grows up and experiences another injustice at school, for example, at the age of sixteen or seventeen. Another child who has not had the first experience may grow up and be exposed to an injustice of the same kind. They come home, complain that they have experienced this injustice, cry, perhaps even scold the teachers, but nothing else happens, the matter passes as if it had never happened, and goes into the subconscious soul life. The other child, however, who grew up having experienced an injustice in the seventh or eighth grade, which it has forgotten in its outer consciousness, may experience exactly the same thing. But now the matter does not pass unnoticed; instead, it leads to the child committing suicide. What is the reason for this? The reason is to be found in what emerges from the hidden depths of the subconscious into the conscious life of the soul, even though the conscious life of the soul may have been exactly the same for both children.

In countless cases, we can perceive how our subconscious soul life plays into our conscious life in this way. Let us assume the following, which we encounter again and again, but which unfortunately is not given proper attention. There are people who, throughout their later life, show something of a trait that could be called longing. It surges up. And when you ask them what they long for, they say: the terrible thing is that they don't know what they long for. And all the reasons for consolation and the like that one can muster, that can otherwise comfort a person, cannot comfort them; the longing remains, no matter what one tries. If one then uses the same methods that are used in the natural sciences, the methods of observation, to look back into the earlier lives of such people, one notices that very specific early experiences have caused this longing. One will then find — and anyone who makes observations in such areas can convince themselves of this — that in their early youth, these people's attention and interest were always directed toward something very specific that was not actually connected to the deepest essence of their soul; they were directed into a sphere of soul activity and their attention was captivated by something that the soul did not crave. Therefore, everything that they would have liked to achieve in their souls remained denied to these souls. Their attention was directed toward something completely different from what it was intended for; it literally shifted. Therefore, the following now becomes apparent. Because attention and interest were not satisfied earlier, because the person always had that urge for which nothing was offered, what were many successive experiences has now been transformed into a tendency, an impulse, something that acts like a passion, like an instinct, which manifests itself in a longing desire, in an indefinite longing for something. In the past, it would have been possible to satisfy this urge, but now it is no longer possible. Why? Because in the stream of soul life, only those events have taken place to which attention has been directed and to which the soul did not feel drawn. Now, such concepts have become established that people have no understanding of what was once appropriate for them. In the past, no understanding was shown for what reigns and weaves in the depths of the soul; now he has lost this habit, and now it is no longer possible to intervene. What remains is that for which he was perhaps not at all organized.

Thus we see how, alongside the conscious life of the human being, a subconscious current runs through the soul life, and we see it in a thousand cases in everyday life. But how the conscious soul life descends into the subconscious, and how the human being can nevertheless intervene in the subconscious depths of the soul life, is shown by other phenomena. This brings us to the chapter of spiritual science that shows us how the life of the soul reaches down to the etheric body, which works on the physical body, where the human being descends, as it were, into his own foundations. But what does he find there? He finds that which leads his own life beyond the narrow circle of the human being, that which connects him with the whole universe, for we are connected with the whole universe both through the physical body and through the etheric body. When the soul life pours into the etheric body, we can live out our being into the vastness of the world, and then what we might call a first announcement of the fusion of the human being with the whole world occurs, with that which is no longer himself, but which is the world. Then we penetrate into the human life of imagination. And when the human being descends even further, he expands his inner being even more and penetrates beyond what otherwise encloses the human being as the ordinary conditions of time and space, and experiences how his physical body and etheric body are enclosed in the whole universe and dependent on it. Thus, what is outside of man illuminates his consciousness when he descends into the physical body. Having seen how the hidden life of the soul can shine up into human consciousness, we must, on the other hand, descend with our consciousness into the hidden depths of the soul's life. We come to these depths when we first descend through the imagination, if it is real imagination, as Goethe understands it, and not mere fantasy. And if we descend even further, we come to what we call clairvoyant powers, which are not limited to what humans otherwise have at their disposal in terms of time and space, but we come to worlds that are otherwise invisible.

As we descend into the hidden depths of the soul, we enter the realm of imagination and further into the realm of clairvoyance and the region of the hidden things of existence. The points of passage, however, are the hidden "depths of one's own soul. Only by penetrating these can we reach the hidden depths of existence, which are spiritual, supersensible, no longer perceptible to ordinary consciousness, and which underlie the things of the perceptible world. Through imagination, when a person does not engage in fantasy but, out of a deepened life, out of a sharing in life with things, creates things in such a way that the comprehensive image takes the place of external perception, a person feels very well — — and the true artist will always maintain this — how he grows together with things, how he cannot describe what he expresses through imagination as the essence of things, but that imagination is the way through which one can penetrate what is deeper than what the intellect and external science can grasp. That is why a philosopher, Frohschammer, did something rather ingenious and described what underlies the world, what is creative, in a one-sided way as the “creative imagination” in things. So that when a person descends from their ordinary conscious soul life into subconscious regions — and who would not admit that life in imagination belongs to the subconscious regions of soul life — after these philosophical discussions, they would grow closer to the essence of things, which is self-creative in things as imagination, than through mere intellect. Although this view is highly one-sided, one can nevertheless say of this idea of imagination as a creative world power that it is more in harmony with what else mysteriously manifests itself in the world than a mere intellectual view. When man, with what he can create with his intellect, moves over to the world of a thousand possibilities, to the world of imagination as opposed to the mere hundred possibilities of the intellect, he feels that he is indeed departing from what must dominate everyday life, but that he is nevertheless entering the world of what presents itself in the depths of the soul as a comprehensive possibility, in comparison to which what is experienced on the surface appears only as a small excerpt. Or do not the millions of possibilities lie at the bottom of existence, as opposed to the mere thousand realities that spread out on the surface of existence and which we perceive? One need only look at what is produced in marine life as fish embryos, what is produced as infinitely diverse possibilities, and how this compares to the manifestations of life that then emerge from it, and one will see how many embryos that life conjures up are possible. And how many of these seeds become reality? This shows how much richer life is in the depths compared to what can be seen on the surface. It is no different when human beings descend from what their minds can grasp into the realm of imagination. And just as we descend from the realm of external reality into the realm of infinite possibilities, so too do we descend from the world of the intellect into the magical realm of imagination.

But it is one-sided to want to equate the creative world force with the imagination, because although human beings descend through the imagination, they do not descend far enough to enter the reality of the supersensible world from these depths. They can only do this when they develop the clairvoyant powers that we find when we descend from the upper regions of soul life into the hidden depths of the soul, but with consciousness, that is, into the powers that otherwise only arise unconsciously. This has also already been hinted at here, how the human being can descend with consciousness into subconscious regions. If a person wants to descend in this way, they must make their own soul into an instrument, a tool, so that it becomes an artificial instrument for perceiving the world in the spirit, just like the instruments and similar tools that chemists and physicists use in their laboratories for external things. The soul must become an instrument, which it is not in everyday life. But then Goethe's saying is true:

Mysterious in the light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of its veil,
And what it may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force it out with levers and screws.

It is not with such instruments and through such experiments, which are based on levers and screws, that is, on external things in general, that one can penetrate the spirit. But when one illuminates with consciousness that which otherwise reigns in the hidden depths of the soul, so that what is otherwise shrouded in darkness emerges into the light, then one can penetrate those depths of the spirit in which the human soul lives as something eternal and infinite with the creative beings who are just as infinite as it is itself. And only by undergoing intimate experiences within itself can the soul become such an instrument.

It has already been pointed out here, and is described in detail in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” how human beings can achieve, through meditation and concentration, what consciously leads the soul down into the hidden depths of soul life. When human beings are able to exclude what the senses perceive through a strong decision of the will, when they are able to suppress what they otherwise remember in life, what are worries, cares, excitements, and so on, what the agitated mind otherwise presents to them, then they can remain within themselves with their empty soul life. All memories of external perception are erased, as they are in sleep. But in sleep, the forces that reign in the hidden depths of the soul are not strong enough to penetrate consciousness, or rather, the soul is not yet strong enough to consciously illuminate the hidden depths. Human beings can only achieve this if they focus their will on their subconscious life, for example, by devoting themselves to a particular idea or complex of ideas, let us say to what the subconscious otherwise does. This must be completely immersed in the will. The will must be decisive for what we think, and nothing else is decisive except what the human being places himself in through his will. In meditation, the human being imagines a content of imagination through his will. If he thinks, looks at, and remembers nothing else for a long time except what he has imagined for himself, if he is able to become one with his will, and the will brings the thoughts into the horizon of consciousness, and if he is able to grasp these ideas firmly in his mind's eye and to concentrate all the powers of his soul, which are otherwise scattered, in a single focus of attention, if he places the will at the center and has the ability not to allow such an idea to have a suggestive effect on him, that is, if he always remains master of himself and is not under the compulsion of such an idea, but can erase it again and again if he wants to, in short, if he brings his soul to this point and achieves such a strong inner development of will, then he has taken a first step. But it is not the ideas of the outside world that have the strongest effect, but those ideas which we call symbolic, emblematic. If we take, for example, the idea that human beings have of “light” or “wisdom” reigning in the soul, they will be able to achieve a great deal if they bring it into their consciousness through their will, but they will not get very far. It will be different, however, if people tell themselves that wisdom is represented by the symbol of light, or love by the symbol of warmth, that is, if they choose symbolic ideas that live directly in the soul itself, in short, if he renounces ideas borrowed from the outer world and instead considers ideas that he has created himself, which are not even unambiguous but ambiguous, and devotes himself to them. Then, if one thinks materialistically, one can say that such a person is a fantasist in practice, because these ideas mean nothing. But they do not need to mean anything; they are only meant to be educators for the soul, so that the soul can dive down into the hidden depths. When a person, through strict rules, transforms their soul from what it is in everyday life, where external forces from outside or from the hidden life of the soul prevail in order to bring in ideas, into one in which everything is subject to the conscious will, where they allow the whole life of ideas to play out internally in strong forces, then they live in true meditation, in true concentration, and through such exercises their soul becomes something else. Those who go through this can notice that their soul descends into other regions. When we describe what such a practitioner, such a meditator, can experience, it will immediately become apparent that he comes to the real, inner, central essence, to the supersensible, inner central essence of the human being. The following experience can come into play.

The human being can reach a certain point where he perceives that the ideas he is developing are doing something to him, transforming something in him. He ceases to know only something of thoughts, of a soul life that he has had up to now, but perceives something that wants to go out from the soul life into the vastness of the worlds and works creatively on him from the vastness of space. The person feels as if they have grown together with space, but always under the full control of their consciousness. Now, something else is added to this experience, which is extremely significant and must never be ignored if the reality of the outer supersensible world is to be experienced experimentally. The person becomes aware: something is happening within you, but you cannot possibly imagine what is going on inside you in the same way as you imagine things in ordinary life; you cannot grasp what is going on inside you with the sharp contours of thought; you have an experience within you that is rich, that is ambiguous, but you cannot bring it into your consciousness. It is as if the person would encounter resistance if they were to bring this into their ordinary consciousness. They must become aware that there is an expanded consciousness behind them, but they feel resistance, as if they could not use the ordinary instruments of their body. There one becomes aware of how one is still something else inwardly than what one consciously knows. One becomes aware that one is working the forces into the etheric body, but that the physical body rests inside like a heavy block, that it does not yield. That is the first experience. And the later experience, when we repeat the exercises over and over again, is that the physical body begins to yield, so that we are able to translate what we experience into the ideas of ordinary life, which at first could not be translated, but could only be experienced in the deeper, hidden life of the soul.

Everything that is experienced in spiritual worlds and communicated in spiritual science is clothed in the ideas and logical concepts of ordinary life. But as it comes to us, it is not gained through logical conclusions, nor through any external assessment of things, but it is gained through supersensible experience, through illuminating the hidden foundations of the human being with his consciousness. And only then, after it has been experienced in the supersensible, is it brought down into ordinary consciousness, in that the person who has thus made his own soul an instrument for perceiving the supersensible has evoked in his soul that which now also transforms his organism down into the physical and etheric forces of the body, so that it can be expressed in ordinary concepts and communicated to the outer world. Spiritual science is communicated “logically.”

When we consider what we have in terms of subconscious soul forces, we can say: The soul researcher sees what is happening there. — As in the example mentioned earlier, when we said that a dream experience repeats itself, he sees how the core of the soul first works within the human being. When the drawing abilities then appear, the result of this work becomes apparent in the human consciousness. So we first see work on the subconscious, then a transformation and emergence into consciousness of what is working in the background. When consciously diving down, the human being first lives in meditation and concentration in his consciousness. There, the power of the will, which is used for meditation and concentration, brings about the transformation of the etheric and physical bodies. It is we ourselves who then bring what we experience supersensibly into our everyday consciousness. It is therefore spiritually and experimentally possible to bring what we observe in life into immediate perception, but only if the human being descends into the hidden depths of his soul.

What I have described here as artificial training and as the only correct training for the present-day human being who wants to attain clairvoyant powers through training also occurs naturally for people who are predisposed to what can be called working from the core of their soul. Human beings can also, by virtue of their natural predisposition, lead certain powers down into the hidden depths of the soul. Then a kind of natural clairvoyance occurs. Such clairvoyance, like the self-conscious clairvoyance described above, can lead to what has been indicated. When a person penetrates into the depths of their soul in this way and becomes aware of how what they have worked into their etheric body through meditation and concentration is working on their physical organization, they no longer remain in the space-time conditions in which they would otherwise remain if they only stayed within their outer perception, but they penetrate space and time and everything else in the sensory world and also come to the things that underlie the sensory things as spiritual. When we see people with trained clairvoyant consciousness penetrating to the essence of things, this can also happen in a certain way through natural predisposition. In the lecture on the “Meaning of Prophecy,” it was shown in the case of Nostradamus how such a development of clairvoyant powers took place through natural predisposition. How this plays into life, how everything that is expanded consciousness, how the soul forces that lie outside the ordinary limits of conscious soul life work, can be gleaned from a book that I would like to refer to here. It beautifully illustrates how the workings of the hidden soul and spirit forces appear to external science, as well as the connection between these spirit forces, which are attained without special training, and what is described in my book about the relationship of human beings to the higher worlds. You will find this described in the book "The Mystery of Man in the Light of Psychic Research. An Introduction to Occultism" by Ludwig Deinhard, which describes the two methods of supersensible research, both that which adheres to external science and that which adheres to what can be achieved through real training, through meditation, concentration, and so on, in order to penetrate the supersensible worlds. But anyone who wants to delve more deeply into what the soul goes through should turn to what is presented in my book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.”

Thus we see how the soul manifests everywhere that strange, earthquake-like surge of forces that reigns down below in the depths. On the other hand, however, we see how spiritual science is called upon to point out how human beings can also descend into their own soul life, into the hidden depths of existence, experimentally, but only through the experiment they must carry out with their own soul life. But only by passing through the hidden depths of the soul and first of all grasping ourselves there can we also penetrate the hidden depths, the spiritual foundations, the region of the eternal and immortal in the outer world. Spiritual science passes through the hidden depths of the soul life to the hidden depths of the outer world, the cosmic, the universe. That is the essence of the process, of the methods of spiritual science.

When we look at things in this way, Goethe's words, spoken in response to Haller's misunderstood view of nature, become true for us in a very special sense. When Haller said: “No created spirit penetrates into the innermost depths of nature; blessed are those to whom it shows only its outer shell!”, Goethe said, as a person who, through his natural disposition, had advanced to the limits of clairvoyance and was aware that there is a connection between the conscious life of human beings and the penetration into the hidden depths of the soul, and from there into the hidden depths of the cosmos, knowing this from his own life, from his life with the outside world, with nature itself, he said in response to Haller's words, which only accept knowledge of the outside world and focus on recognizing the surface:

"Into the innermost depths of nature —
O, you philistine! —
“No creative spirit penetrates.”
Me and my siblings
You may remember such words
But not just now!
We think: place by place
We are inside.
“Blessed are those to whom
The outer shell reveals!”
I have heard this repeated for sixty years;
I curse it, but secretly;
Tell me a thousand thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;
You must examine yourself most of all,
Whether you are core or shell!

Truly, we can say that much in the world is mysterious, and that man, with what rises to his consciousness, has little more than the shell of his soul life. But we see, if we only use the right methods, how man can penetrate through the shell of life to the core of his soul, and that when he penetrates into the depths of his soul, he also has the prospect of penetrating into the life of the universe. Therefore, we can truly say with Goethe:

When observing nature,
Always regard everything as one!
Nothing is inside, nothing is outside:
For what is inside is outside.

But man must first find the hidden inner self! Thus, by pointing in its own way to the hidden depths of the soul's life, spiritual science is able to arouse in man feelings that are quite different from those aroused by mere external science. It may admit that when we look out into the world, we see mystery upon mystery. And these mysteries may often cause shivers when we find our own inner life so mysterious and when we perceive how the forces of this inner life work their way into what we must immediately experience, or when human beings stand with anxious anticipation before what the unknown may yet become and give. We see human beings facing mystery upon mystery in relation to the outer world. But when we compare outer life with inner life in the right way, we feel as if hidden forces are at work down there in our own inner soul life, forces that do not penetrate the narrow circle of ordinary consciousness, but, like the forces in an earthquake, rise to the surface, like subterranean soul forces pushing their way into conscious awareness. But when we see, on the one hand, how we can hopefully accept the certainty that human beings can descend into the depths of their own souls and solve mystery after mystery there, we also gain hope for what spiritual science further promises: that not only can the hidden mysteries of the soul life be revealed to us, but also that as we pass through our soul life and open the gate to the spiritual world, mystery after mystery can be solved for the human soul and new perspectives can open up through the revelation of the great world outside. Thus, when human beings have the courage to grasp themselves as a mystery and strive to elevate the soul itself as an instrument of perception, they advance toward the hope and confidence that the great mysteries of the spiritual world will also be solved more and more to their satisfaction and to their security in life.