Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 14 March 1912, Berlin

Self-education in the Light of Spiritual Science

Contemporary cultural conditions, and in particular the prospects for the near future, will undoubtedly attach ever greater importance to what might be called human self-education. This evening, in accordance with the spiritual scientific worldview that I represent here, I would like to say a few words about this self-education of human beings, albeit only in a general way, given the breadth of the subject. I would like to emphasize from the outset that today's lecture does not primarily intend to discuss the kind of self-education that can be called the education of human beings in spiritual research. Rather, this evening's talk will focus on the kind of self-education that plays a role in ordinary, everyday life, which must, so to speak, precede education in spiritual research, and which is of significance and value not only for this, but for every human being in general.

Now, undoubtedly, as soon as the word self-education is uttered, everyone will feel that in a certain sense this word actually implies something contradictory, or at least something whose implementation is fraught with great difficulties. Why is this? Well, for the very simple reason that education actually presupposes reliance on something foreign, something standing above the person being educated. But when we speak of self-education, we naturally mean the education that a person can give themselves, that is, the education in which the person is, in a sense, both educator and pupil. This undoubtedly immediately points to a great difficulty in life.

Let us now consider what can be said about the education of children and young people from the standpoint of spiritual science. You will find everything that can be said on this subject summarized in my little book: “The Education of the Child from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science.” Of course, it is impossible to even begin to summarize what is said in that little book today. But it should be pointed out that when we consider the real, actual human being, the whole human being, in the sense of spiritual science, we come to accept certain main impulses of education by following his or her development to a certain degree of maturity. We find that up to about the age of seven, that is, until the change of teeth, education must proceed from what can be called the child's imitation, the child's imitative instinct. Now, it has been emphasized in that writing that, basically, what is more significant than all moral rules and all other instructions for the education of the child in these first years of life is what the child sees and hears from those who are adults in its environment. Moving on, we then find that important period in human childhood that begins with the change of teeth and lasts until about the age of sexual maturity. Here again, if we free ourselves from all prejudices and look purely at the real development of the human being, at the real conditions of this development, we find that the most significant educational impulse for these years must be what we call authority. And a healthy education for these years comes about when the child is confronted during this time with adults in whom it has trust and faith, so that, without intervening with any vague intellectual ideas or immature criticism, it can form its principles and rules of conduct based on the authority of these people around it. The authoritative principle is the basic principle of education for these years. You will find what can be said to justify this in that little book. And when we then consider the human being up to the age of twenty or twenty-one, we find, through the basic conditions of his development, that the essential thing is what can be called intellectual maturity, and in particular looking up to an impersonal ideal grasped in the soul, that is, to a purely spiritual educational impulse that stands above what the person himself can be at this age. This is precisely the essence of the ideal, that we strive for it and always have the feeling, especially in youth, that we are not quite up to the ideal in our whole behavior and our whole being, that the ideal hovers above us like a heavenly image and we strive for it with the awareness that we can never actually attain it. And only when these periods of time are over does the human being enter that epoch of his earthly existence in which, basically, self-education can begin, or where, in the narrower sense of the word, one can speak of self-education. With the exception of the last, the third educational impulse, which is also such for young people that they take it as an ideal from the great impulses of world history, and that other human ideals are given to them, which they also adopt from outside, the remaining educational impulses, such as the authoritative principle, are based on an ideal, also on what can be called the relationship to something still foreign, to something that is assumed to be more perfect. The pupil thus faces the impulses that come to him for his education as something foreign; he looks up to them.

If we are to speak of self-education in truth, it goes without saying that we cannot speak in the same way as we speak of educational impulses for the first years of human life, and therein lies the contradiction—not merely a logical contradiction, but an idealistic one. If a person is to become their own educator, it must be assumed that the impulses for this are within them. But if a person is to become their own educator, is it not infinitely more likely that this self-education will not so much expand and perfect them or enrich their living conditions as constrain them? Is it not obvious that they will undertake self-education according to certain things that are already within them, that they have set in their minds or accepted, and that they will undermine the rich possibilities that may emerge within them, so that such self-education could easily constrain them instead of expanding and perfecting them? Is this contradiction not quite obvious?

Yes, we see that, because of the cultural conditions we have today, self-education is necessarily becoming more and more the subject of consideration, as views on self-education, on education for individuality and personality, are emerging everywhere. We can understand this. We do not need to go back to ancient India or to what has lived on from ancient India into the new, we do not need to go back to ancient Egypt and realize how a certain caste system placed people in a certain place in life from the outset and made it impossible for them to develop freely, so to speak, and how the way they were supposed to behave was determined, or still is today, by the way they are placed in the social order. We do not need to go back to these ancient times. We can go to the more recent times that are close to us, which still intrude into our own with their full character, and we see how what we can call the determination of the human being by, let us say, blood relationship, tribal affiliation, caste affiliation, and so on, was present and is still present in part. But on the other hand, we also see how, especially in our present time, a completely different social structure is forming out of this one, one that increasingly and directly confronts human beings with each other, so that human beings stand opposite each other in the social order. Yes, we even see how not only human beings stand opposite each other, but how human beings are increasingly left to their own devices when they feel confronted by nature and the entire universe. We see how, in the course of life, they are dependent on their own judgment, on the convictions formed in their own souls, on the way they can think and reflect on moral, aesthetic, and religious relationships. It goes without saying that humans, who are increasingly left to their own devices, must have the prerequisite: in the depths of my soul, I must search for what confronts me as a human being with other humans, indeed, what places me in the world in a satisfying way as a human being.

We can understand that under these conditions, the call for self-education must become increasingly prevalent. How human beings should behave when they are to place themselves in life and the world according to very specific traditional rules can be instilled in childhood education. However, as our lives develop more and more, and must develop, because the conditions of this development cannot be reversed by any power in the world, it turns out that human beings must actually feel called upon again and again throughout their entire earthly existence to develop an unbiased judgment in every situation in life where they may find themselves in relation to another human being. They must work on themselves their whole lives in order to achieve ever greater perfection in their entire attitude toward the world. With regard to such behavior, the most important impulses are not actually given during childhood, but when human beings have to establish their own position in the world, so that they are left to their own devices in accordance with their age, then they must begin, at a time when they can no longer feel the urge to submit to other educators, to become their own guides, their own educators, that is, to become the one who makes him more and more perfect. And so we see how our literature and our public cultural life are flooded with all kinds of reflections on the development of personality, on the development of individuality, on the striving to achieve harmony in life, and so on. This is something that is understandable, even self-evident, in our time. But anyone who looks more deeply into these things will very soon notice that, basically, such contemporary aspirations often express precisely what has just been characterized as an impulse that leads to the restriction of life rather than to its perfection and enrichment.

We see that one person strives for this or that ideal in order to reach people through the instructions they want to give, through this or that processing of the life of thought. The other is more inclined toward physical instruction, prescribing to all people what he himself perhaps likes best according to his personal taste and personal sympathy, giving all kinds of external physical exercises or prescribing this or that diet, this or that daily routine, and the like. As I said, our public life and our literature are virtually inundated with such principles. From the outset, however, it should be said that the intention here is not to dismiss and criticize these endeavors; there may be much that is good in them. However, much of it can also seem one-sided, such as the endeavors that tie in with Ralph Waldo Trine's book “In Harmony with the Infinite.” For it must be said that those who devote themselves to such endeavors by forming a narrowly limited concept of how to develop a harmonious life, so to speak, do not so much develop, enrich, and perfect their life forces as constrain, limit, and restrict them, even though they may experience momentary comfort, inner satisfaction, or perhaps even bliss on the basis of such a restriction. However, one can disregard the fact that, precisely in these endeavors, the most curious peculiarities, one might say fantasies, are currently occurring, giving everyone the opportunity, without having to concern themselves much with these things, to praise as universally human that which they personally sympathize with. One must delve deeper into human nature if one wants to speak of self-education in the sense of spiritual science. It is precisely the peculiarity of spiritual science that it avoids the one-sidedness of other endeavors, that it has these other endeavors as small circles around it, so to speak, and that it wants to be the large circle that, out of devotion to the whole nature of the human being, wants to recognize the conditions for individual human life. It is always more convenient to devote oneself to one-sided approaches that promise, for example, to restore one's health in a short time, or to improve one's memory, or to achieve practical success in life. It is more convenient, and the path of spiritual science is a more difficult and inconvenient one, but it is the one that is based on the whole nature and whole essence of the human being.

Now, when we speak of the self-education of human beings, we may perhaps gain some insight into how this self-education can be arranged in a favorable way if we consider how, even at that time when human beings are, so to speak, still called upon by their age to be educated by others, a certain self-education already comes into play. This might seem like an even greater contradiction than the one indicated earlier, but it is not. Spiritual science shows us that the human self is broader than what is enclosed in the immediate personality. Indeed, the whole spiritual scientific view is based on the fact that human beings can, in a sense, transcend themselves, transcend what is enclosed within the limits of their personality, and yet never need to lose themselves. Is there an example in ordinary life of what spiritual science actually wants to represent in a much more comprehensive way in all areas of existence? Yes, there are two things in ordinary life that already show that human beings can transcend their personality and yet remain themselves, so to speak, without losing themselves. One is what we call human compassion, joy, sympathy, what we call comprehensive love. What is this love, this compassion, and this joy based on? They only appear less mysterious than they are because humans easily accept what is familiar. Just as the savage does not ask why the sun rises and sets, but accepts the familiar, and man only begins to think about the rising and setting of the sun when he becomes cultured, so too does man in ordinary life not think about shared joy and compassion. Only when one begins to seek enlightenment about the meaning and purpose of life do such things as human compassion and shared joy become mysteries of life, presenting themselves as secrets of life. We need only imagine one thing, and we will immediately see that shared joy and compassion are an extension of the human self as it initially presents itself.

Joy and suffering, as experienced by the human personality, are the most intimate, the most innermost aspects of experience. When we have another person in front of us and an impulse arises in us that reflects their suffering or joy, then we are not merely living within ourselves, but within the other person. And all philosophical speculation that something is triggered in us in some way by sensory impressions cannot lead us beyond the reality that something active is created in us through sharing in the joys and sufferings of others. When we feel their joy and suffering in an intimate way, we have stepped outside ourselves and entered into the innermost sanctum of the other person, into what we feel within ourselves as our very essence. And now we need only imagine, since we cannot cross over with our consciousness into the consciousness of another, which no one will deny: If, at the moment when we feel compassion or joy in a soul separate from our own, we were to experience ourselves in a state of powerlessness in the soul of the other, then there would be no way to pass from one personality to the other without losing ourselves in the process. As strange as it sounds, it is significant for life: we penetrate a foreign being, and no powerlessness overwhelms us; we penetrate out of ourselves and live inside the other, and we do not become powerless in the process.

All spiritual scientific development proceeds according to exactly the same pattern, in no other way. Just as human beings penetrate into a foreign entity through joy and compassion without losing themselves, so they penetrate into foreign entities through spiritual research without losing themselves. This is not possible in normal life, because when human beings step outside themselves in normal life in order to perceive and recognize, they fall asleep and are no longer themselves. In normal life, human beings do not do what they achieve in moral life — only in the one case of sharing in joy and compassion. Therefore, the peculiar behavior of human beings in sharing in joy and compassion is the model for all spiritual research activity; this proceeds in the same way as normal life proceeds in compassion and sharing in joy. This is the one area where human beings transcend their own personalities without losing themselves.

The other thing that also belongs to ordinary life in the moral sphere is what we experience in the impulse of conscience. Anyone who examines conscience — it has also been spoken of here — knows that when human beings hear the voice of conscience, they hear something that goes beyond their personal sympathies and antipathies, and can even correct them in a powerful way. Again, our moral life is arranged in such a way that when we go beyond ourselves through such judgments of conscience, we nevertheless do not lose ourselves or fall into powerlessness. All spiritual science is based on the fact that human beings can enter a sphere, a realm that lies outside the personality that they encompass with their consciousness, with their everyday life, and within which they do not lose themselves when they move in it. Indeed, if we consider the matter without prejudice, is not what we have repeatedly discussed in this series of lectures also based on this: insight into repeated earthly lives and into the law of cause and effect from one life to the next? That, too, is based on this. The person who, with ordinary consciousness, encompasses what lies between birth and death learns through spiritual science to recognize that what he encompasses with his judgment, what his memory extends over, may be addressed by him as his personal self. But they also learn to recognize that when they leave this personal self with their thoughts and ascend to a self that now not only lives through the instrument of their body, but builds this body itself, that not only lives in one body between birth and death, but goes through many births and deaths and always appears on earth, that this self is indeed their self. Even if man cannot remember previous earthly stages in his normal consciousness and can only be convinced theoretically of the truth of repeated earthly lives and the effects of those causes that work from one earthly life into another they can nevertheless assume that what is within them is not exhausted in their personality, but that what is within them is, as it were, supra-personal, and that what is now their personality first creates itself and first proves effective within itself. Just as we go beyond ourselves in our conscience, in our compassion and joy, through direct experience, so spiritual scientific research goes beyond experience into a higher realm. But when a person knows spiritual science, they can never admit that they themselves are lost in this higher realm, for there is something at work there that is connected with them, to which they belong, and in which they do not in reality lose themselves at all when they first lose themselves in it with their ordinary, normal consciousness.

Thus, spiritual science is something that takes the form of a higher self, just as we embrace other beings in compassion and joy without losing ourselves. So when we know our expanded self, through which we enter into other beings, then we can already say of the child that, apart from what we as educators can hold on to, what develops out of normal consciousness, there is something present as a higher being outside the ordinary self that is already working on the child. If we consider this, we may find something in the child where a kind of education is already taking place, while with our ordinary education we can only address the child's personal self. Where do we find what is active in the child as a higher self, as a higher being that belongs to the child but does not enter into consciousness? It may seem strange, but it is nevertheless true that this is active in the child in rational, well-conducted play. In the child's play, we can only create the conditions for education. But what is achieved through play is basically achieved through the child's self-activity, through everything that we cannot banish with strict rules. Yes, the essence and educational value of play is based precisely on the fact that we stop with our rules, with our pedagogical and educational skills, and leave the child to its own devices. For what does the child do when we leave it to its own devices? Then the child tries out external objects in play to see whether this or that works through its own activity. It puts its own will into action, into motion. And in the way that external things behave under the influence of the will, it happens that the child educates itself in a completely different way than through the influence of a personality or its pedagogical principle, even if only through play. That is why it is so important that we interfere as little as possible with the child's play. The more the play is engaged in what is not understood, what is seen in its liveliness, the better the play is. Therefore, when we give a child a toy that simulates the movement of people or things by pulling strings or other means, whether in a picture book with moving animals or people, or in other toys, we educate them better through play than if we give them the most beautiful building blocks. For too much intellectual activity is mixed into this, which belongs to a more personal principle than that of groping around with the living and moving, which is not understood intellectually but is observed in its full activity. The less definite and contrived what is shown in play is, the better it is, because something higher, which cannot be forced into human consciousness, can then enter, because the child approaches life by trying things out and not intellectually. Here we see how the child is already being educated by something that goes beyond the personal.

In a certain way, play remains an important educational factor for the whole of life. Of course, this does not refer to card games, because all games that are directed at the intellect and combinatorial thinking are such that they attack the personal aspect of the human being, which is most closely linked to the instrument of the brain. No matter how much good is said about chess, it can never be a factor in self-education because it depends on what is most closely linked to the brain, which is the ability to make combinations. When, on the other hand, a person engages in athletic games or gymnastic exercises, where they have to move their muscles in such a way that they cannot combine anything, that they do not strain their mind at all, but develop directly through testing their muscles, i.e., through doing and not through understanding, then we are dealing with a self-educational game. From this we immediately gain something that is an important principle for all self-education of human beings. This is that the person who has to educate themselves, both through the education of their will and through the education of their intellect, will, above all, in the education of their will, be dependent on imparting this education of the will, this cultivation of the will, through the cultivation of interaction, of the interrelationship with the outside world. The will of the human being cannot be educated through inner mental or inner imaginative training, but the will of the human being is strengthened so that the human being has a firm inner foundation when he seeks this cultivation of the will in the interaction of his own will with the outside world. Therefore, it is downright harmful to the ordinary, everyday self-education of human beings, and to a considerable extent damaging to self-education, if human beings try to strengthen their will for external life through inner means, through inner training.

This brings us to a number of things that are highly recommended for people's self-education today, and about which, from a truly spiritual scientific point of view, one cannot warn enough. People are advised on how to develop a self-confident demeanor that impresses others, how to train their will so that they can step into life and carry out actions that correspond to their intentions. For example, it is recommended that people do exercises that consist of avoiding fear, curiosity, other passions, and negative feelings — in short, working on negative feelings and sensations. I know that some who hear this now will say afterwards: Today, there has been talk against controlling fear, passion, and so on. But that is not the case. Rather, it has been said that these demands that people place on themselves in this way cannot lead to a real cultivation of the will that is useful for outer life. For the cultivation of the will that people need for outer life should also be acquired in interaction with outer life. And it is much more correct, if human beings need a strong will for life, that they seek to acquire it by having to prove their external strength, whereby they must exert their bodies and be careful with their eyes, that is, really take up the struggle with the immediate sensory world. This is what brings us into real harmony with the external world, with that external world from which our muscular activity and our entire physical organization are formed, formed, of course, from the spirit.

But by directing our self-education in this way, we also work on those parts of our spiritual organism that lead us to harmony with the external world that surrounds us. But if we only work internally with thought concentration and so on, which can be found in bookstores today, we work in isolation from the world in this limited soul, which is not in harmony with the world, but which derives its meaning precisely from its isolation. It is true that those who expose themselves to external dangers and seek to overcome them practice better self-education than those who buy books on self-education and then begin to do exercises to achieve fearlessness, dispassion, and so on. Certainly, such easy things can lead to a person gaining all kinds of personal advantages, but always by developing what separates them from the world, while the former characterizes them as placing themselves selflessly into the world. I said that there may now be some who claim: So you are speaking against fearlessness, dispassion, and against all things that could be said to belong to the education of the human being. — But this must be emphasized only in one case, when it comes to the development of the will for the outer physical world, when the human being wants to educate himself to strengthen and fortify the will in the outer world, because these things only have an inner effect and are wrongly applied to the education of character, to the education of the will. They are rightly applied to the education of our knowledge.

Anyone who wants to attain knowledge, who wants to penetrate and look into the supersensible world and has no other goal at first than to see into the supersensible world, is right to do such exercises. Therefore, when such things are expertly extracted from spiritual science, no instruction is given on “How to acquire the powers to train the will in the everyday world,” but rather instructions are given on “How to gain knowledge of the higher worlds.” Where such instructions are given, very careful attention is paid to such designations. These things, as described in my book “How to Gain Knowledge of Higher Worlds,” also lead to a culture of the will, but not directly, rather indirectly, in that those who strive for this development in the higher worlds now wait to see what comes next. The development of the will must then come of its own accord, then it will work in the right sense and take healthy paths.

We may therefore say that the cultivation of the will, the self-education of the will, must first of all be based on the human being establishing a healthy relationship between his ordinary nature, which is located in the physical world, and the outside world, whether this relationship relates more to the cultivation of physical matters or whether what is sought relates more to the formation of character. Instead of brooding over how to become fearless, dispassionate, and so on, it is much more important to face life, to face other people, and then to surrender to one's uninhibited feelings, which play out in distinct shades and are filled here and there with more or less sympathy or antipathy. By going through life in such a way that we develop our share in life everywhere, starting from this or that nuance of that share, we create for our will that interaction with the outside world that can really lead this will from stage to stage. So facing life, standing inside life with all the sympathies and antipathies it demands of us, trains our will. In other words, what leads us beyond ourselves, toward the world, forms our will. Everything that leads us away from the world, that leads us into ourselves, trains our knowledge — and there it is on the right ground — and advances our inner life precisely because we want to develop our own knowledge and our own life. Our own insights, however, lie in the realm of our own development, our psychological development. So we must admit that we become more harmonious in our view of life, in our understanding of life's mysteries, by training our powers of insight, by acquiring inner strength. In contrast, for ordinary life, the will is trained in the right way only by life itself.

We have thus shown where the teacher is actually to be found, who, in a certain sense, when we speak of the self-education of the human being, should be the human being himself. No, it does not have to be the human being himself in his narrow personality, and in particular it does not have to be him in relation to his self-education of the will. If we can rise above this through spiritual science, so that the human being can leave his personality behind without losing himself, then we educate our will when we intervene directly in life, when we allow life to have an effect on us, namely in the same way — and this comparison must not be misunderstood — as play has an effect on a child. But how? Well, there is a way of understanding life, a view of life, which we acquire by wanting to reach into things everywhere with our intellect. In truth, this cultivation of the intellect does not further our development and therefore has no self-educational value. The element that must play the greatest role in the self-education of human beings is what can be called that which goes beyond intellectuality, beyond the intellect, in the acquisition of maturity in life. Just as a child is best educated through play, not by being taught with the intellect, but by trying things out, so too will a person best educate themselves in relation to their will through those experiences of life that they do not comprehend with their intellect, but to which they approach with sympathy, with love, with a feeling that things are sublime or touch their sense of humor. That is what brings us forward. This is where the self-education of the will lies. Reason and intellectual culture usually have no effect on the will. Let us look at how direct experience affects the will.

The moral philosopher who does not take the standpoint of reincarnation — Carneri — points out how the character of a child is something constant, but is formed, and is formed precisely by those elements that arise directly from life. Then he asks: How can a person's character change in a short time? And he says: It can change radically, for example, through a powerful love or friendship, whereby the person suddenly develops such sympathy that they do not examine, but lose themselves in the other person. - Then the character can suddenly take a completely different turn for the simple reason that in those spheres where the character resides, that is, where the will acts, the moods of immediate life come into play. When we face a person and recognize them as this or that excellent or bad person, acting directly with our intellect, our character does not change; otherwise, judges would often have to change their minds within a week. But when this or that feeling of friendship arises, the whole configuration of a person's character often changes. This is full proof that the cultivation of our will depends on the unfolding and development of our moods in life. But since we can, in a certain way, take our lives into our own hands, so to speak, and move toward a certain correction of our moods, we have, in a certain sense, our self-education in relation to the will in our own hands. The only thing is that we must then pay attention to life, that we do not live recklessly and surrender ourselves to the flow of life in a comfortable way, but rather pay attention. Thus we see that the person who has managed to gain some control over their moods can be more of an educator of themselves, but that the worst educator of themselves will be the person who never manages to control their moods, but is constantly lost to them. If we therefore want to be self-educators of our will, then, in order to achieve this indirectly, we must turn to our feelings and sensations and, with wise self-knowledge, explore how we can work on our feelings and sensations. When we are lost in sympathy or antipathy, it is certainly not the time to work on ourselves. Therefore, we must choose moments for will training when we are not particularly engaged with our moods, but are able to reflect on our lives and our feelings. This means that self-education must take place precisely when the required moments demand the least from us. But this is when people do it the least, because it does not concern them directly. And those who then fall back into their moods afterwards only realize later that they have neglected something. But then, when one is in a certain way free from the commitment to life, one forgets it and does not think about it. One of the most important laws is that the will must be trained in life by the person wisely taking control of the course of their moods.

On the other hand, the will is always developed in a selfish, egotistical way when people try to train this will through intellectual culture, using their intellect to make their will strong and powerful for life. Such exercises are directly useful for our culture of knowledge, for what we want to achieve in the spiritual or even later in the psychological realm. However, we can then do nothing else but work on ourselves within our soul. In doing so, it is of particular importance that we first and foremost consider the great contrast that exists between the self-culture of inner life and the self-culture of outer life. In relation to both the former and the latter, mistake after mistake is made in life, and we see one-sidedness after one-sidedness at work. The human body — what is not recommended for it? It may have become less common, but there are still people today who wrap themselves up very tightly and say that wrapping up also protects against heat. The other is much more widespread, namely that a one-sided system of hardening is recommended, protecting oneself little against the cold and the inclemency of the weather, but instead seeking to expose oneself to a lot of air and sun cures. The essential thing is not that people expose themselves to the heat of the sun for this or that purpose, which is usually very unclear to them, which may be quite useful in some circumstances but does not need to be a means of education, or that they repeatedly take cold water cures, but rather, in a word, the essential thing for the body is versatility, which enables the body to expose itself to the cold without catching a cold, or to walk in the blazing heat of the sun in a completely unshaded place. Therefore, one could say that wise self-education cannot generally agree with most of what is recommended today, but will see to it that, basically, something of everything should have a certain harmony on us.

Precisely the opposite of what is good for our body is good for the mind, for the soul. While the outer body needs versatility, adaptation to external circumstances, the soul needs concentration for intellectual culture, the ability to repeatedly reduce the sum of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to a few basic ideas. And the person who, for the sake of his intellectual self-education, does not strive to reduce the scope of his knowledge to a few basic ideas that can dominate everything else, will see his memory suffer from this failure to reduce, as will his nervous system and the way in which he should position himself in life. Those who have managed to reduce certain things to main ideas will find that they face external life, where it demands action from them, with great calm. But those who go through life without reducing what life offers them to a few great fundamental ideas will first show that they have difficulty remembering, that they become unproductive in life, but they will also show that they approach life with a certain disharmony. And because in our time there is so little belief in the concentration of the mind and therefore so little sought after, so many other evils arise that appear as deficiencies in self-education, above all what is commonly called nervousness today. While the will is trained by allowing the muscles to interact with external life, the nervous system must be trained through mental concentration. In short, everything that works from within and ultimately manifests itself in the nervous system is promoted by the goal of reducing our lives to individual ideas, through memory. Caring for the nervous system and its spiritual foundations is necessary if we want to face life with inner stability.

When we talk about these issues, a newer, materialistic view may impose itself on us in this regard, even though the older view can be challenged in many ways from the standpoint of modern humanity. Two things are usually confused here. People can be nervous not through the training of their will, but through the wrong training of their will. The cultivation of the will can lead to nervousness if a person seeks it in the wrong way, if, instead of connecting with the outside world and strengthening their will through its obstacles and inhibitions, they want to achieve it through all kinds of internal means that only work in the imagination. This can easily lead to nervousness of the will. Today, this nervousness is already understood to be something that must be treated with great leniency. Carneri recounts an interesting case in this regard. There was once a landowner who, although he was otherwise a thoroughly good-natured person, sometimes fell into such a state of mind that he beat his people, and because this event belongs to our time, it was called a special case of nervousness. The people suffered greatly from the landowner's mental state, but in more recent times, those who, according to contemporary views, understand the most, had deeply regretted that he lived in such circumstances that he repeatedly beat his people. This went on until one day, as Carneri himself recounts, he came across someone who had done wrong and whom he also wanted to beat up. But the person in question took a stick and beat the landowner so badly that he had to stay in bed for a week. Now something happened: whereas previously the landowner had been pitied because of his state of mind, now not only did people stop pitying him, but after a while he was completely changed. I am not recommending anything by saying this, but it is nevertheless an extremely instructive fact of life. And if we examine it, we can see very clearly that if the landowner had been persuaded, his nervousness would have remained. If his intellect had been influenced, he would not have interacted with the outside world, and he would not have changed. But he did interact with the outside world, namely with the other man's stick. And through something he would never have understood in the truest sense, he learned, when faced with life, the effect he had produced from his state of mind, his nervousness. So the concept of willpower must first be adjusted to recognize that the will can only be strengthened through contact with the outside world, even if we do not always want to train our will in the drastic way described in the above example.

As far as intellectual life is concerned in the self-education of human beings, it is a matter of enabling ourselves to live inwardly in such a way that we awaken the element within us that is inwardly enriching, but which can remain dormant, can remain barren. We develop it by holding together our store of perceptions, by going through it again and again, looking back on certain ideas and reviewing what we have gone through in life, in order to present it to ourselves again and again. It is particularly important that we do not only look at the mind and its culture, that we are not only able to remember, think, and imagine, but, what is much more important and essential, that we learn to forget in the right way through good self-education. Forgetting is not to be recommended here as a special virtue, but when we are confronted with this or that in life, we very soon realize that we cannot transfer what we experience from one moment of experience to a later one. We can sometimes do this with ideas, but in very few cases with the sensations, feelings, pains, and sufferings we have experienced. But how do these continue to have an effect? They fade away and continue to have an effect in the hidden depths of the soul. What is forgotten there is a healthy element that descends into the hidden depths of our soul life. And through this descent of a healthy element, we have something that works on us, that can bring us back from stage to stage. It is not a matter of filling ourselves with all kinds of material, but of following things attentively, retaining what we need, what we have experienced, and descending into the depths of the soul. There we cultivate our intellectual element, we cultivate something that is particularly important: the element of attention. Anyone who believes that this is not particularly important will say: Oh, what does it matter! They are not taking their own personality into their own hands, so to speak. But anyone who knows that what you forget is important will say to themselves: I must take my life into my own hands, I must not let everything affect me. When I go into this or that society where only stupid things are talked about, it may well be that, because I am an intellectual person, I forget it, but it does matter whether I forget this stupid stuff or something healthy and more sensible. So it depends on what subject you include in your forgetting. For from this forgotten something often arises that is now the object of our imagination, our fantasy, in the true sense of the word. And while the intellectual element is a life-wearying, exhausting element, everything that sets our soul forces in motion in such a way that we invent something is a fertilizing, invigorating, and life-promoting element. This is something we must cultivate in particular in a wise self-education.

We have thus considered a few moments of self-education in relation to the intellect and the inner soul element, and if we cultivate this inner soul element in a special way and place the main value on it, we will see that it flows quite naturally into the will and character, whereas all our efforts to influence the character directly tend to weaken it, because we do not place ourselves in a relationship with the greater world.

For all such things that can serve the self-education of human beings, spiritual science provides a supporting element in the law of repeated earthly lives and in the law of karma, that is, in the fact that what I experience in my present life are the effects of previous lives, and that what I experience now will also form the causes for what I will encounter in later life. By introducing the ideas of repeated earthly lives and karma into one's life, one learns to strike the right balance between resignation and the urge to act. It is in relation to these two that we can commit the greatest sins in terms of our self-education. In our present time, even with regard to resignation and the urge to act, people do exactly the opposite of what would correspond to truly wise self-education. Those who stand on the ground of repeated earthly lives will say to themselves: What befalls me in life as my fate, as pain or joy, what brings me together with this or that person, and so on, I must consider from the point of view that it is I myself, with my self that transcends my narrow personality, who has brought all this about. Then we come to something that at first might seem as if it could lead to weakness, to resignation to our fate, to accepting our fate because we know we have built it ourselves. Things must happen to us as they do because they have come about through us. If we have this resignation, it will strengthen and fortify our will, because it is not brought about by an inner training of the will, but by a relationship to external fate, to what befalls us. There is nothing in self-education that can strengthen our will more than resignation and surrender to fate, what is called serenity. Those who are grumpy at every opportunity and indignant about their fate weaken their will. Those who are able to surrender to their fate through wise self-education strengthen their will. Those people are the weakest-willed who feel at every opportunity as if this or that has befallen them completely undeservedly, as if they simply have to shake it off.

This resignation is often not at all convenient for the modern person. Instead, they develop something else all the more. Nowadays, we see resignation in relation to the inner self, to the intellect, to inner powers, and to everything related to inner powers, spreading rapidly everywhere. People immediately resign themselves to their inner soul nature and say: Yes, if you don't like it, it's your fault, it's because you're not paying enough attention. — Devotion to the inner self is most prevalent today among those who are most indignant about their external fate. How complacent human beings are, when it comes down to it. And they are particularly complacent when they emphasize again and again that nothing needs to be developed other than what is already within them today. Today's doctrine of individuality is the purest doctrine of devotion. The idea that individuality must be elevated and that no opportunity to do so should be left unused is something that greatly conflicts with the feelings of devotion of today's active people.

Establishing harmony between inner humility and activity is what must be achieved as the correct pendulum swing. But we can only do this if we remain open to what life has to offer. Remaining open and interested is a requirement that we must place on ourselves, especially in relation to self-education. Thus we see that when people look to the future, they say to themselves: What I am developing now, how I am maturing and unfolding my powers, will work on my existence in the future, it will enrich my destiny. When human beings extend their lives beyond their present incarnation and look to what may emerge as an effect of their present existence, then the urge to act will awaken and human beings will rise above their present nature, and their sense of devotion will be properly activated when they can perceive what befalls them in the present as having been constructed by themselves.

In this way, the ideas of reincarnation and karma can pour out what people of the present need. And the questions that are so frequently raised today about self-education will not receive a proper answer until spiritual science can incorporate the innermost impulse, the inner longing of the truly seeking soul of the present. Spiritual science does not seek to agitate, but it wants to give the present what must be the innermost urge of the modern human soul. It has always been the case that truth had to serve every age for which it was intended in its appropriate form, but that at the same time, that age always rejected the truth. Therefore, even though spiritual science provides the surest foundation for all cultural questions of the present and the near future, it cannot escape the fate, however necessary it may be, of being misunderstood and opposed by what is solely fashionable today, which is to say that it is empty fantasy, daydreaming, if not something worse. But it is precisely when one considers such profoundly incisive questions that one sees the significance and scope of what spiritual science can and does offer as an elixir of life. Then, no matter how much opposition and scorn are directed against spiritual science, one can also sense what it is and what it can be as an elixir of life. One can apply to it a word that can help those who understand its true depths and significance to overcome all the opposition and misunderstandings that arise against it, a word spoken by a man with whom one cannot agree on everything, but who in this respect has hit the nail on the head. Arthur Schopenhauer's words apply to the fate of that truth which, with spiritual science, must enter into humanity for all cultural questions of the present and the near future: "Throughout the centuries, poor truth has had to blush for being paradoxical, and yet it is not her fault. She cannot take on the form of the enthroned general error. There she looks up with a sigh to her guardian god, Time, who beckons her victory and glory, but whose wing beats are so large and slow that the individual dies before reaching them. And what Schopenhauer could not yet add, modern spiritual science can add by saying: May the guardian god time, have such large and wide wings that the individual personality, the individual, cannot see the truth of time, that the personality must die before the truth can triumph, spiritual science shows us that an eternal core of being lives in this personality, which always returns and is not limited to the individual personality, but passes from life to life.

Therefore, we can say to ourselves: Even if the wings of time are so large and so wide that the individual personality dies and does not experience the victory of truth, what lives within us, our self, can, if we transcend the personality, still experience this victory and all victories, for the ever-new life will always defeat the old death. Spiritual science, drawing on deep foundations of truth, will confirm Lessing's words, which shine out to us like an extract from earlier centuries, as the victory of truth. What the spiritual researcher has to say about the comprehensive essence of the human being, looking at what he achieves outside his personality, if he does not lose himself outside this personality, the soul is able to express as the deepest, most significant force of its life, saying to itself: “Is not all eternity mine?!”