Results of Spiritual Research

GA 62 — 21 November 1912, Berlin

4. The Paths of Psychic Cognition

In the introductory lectures of this year's winter cycle, we have already often pointed out the sources of man's supersensible knowledge, the knowledge of which – and also of its relationship to the world in which we live – this entire lecture cycle is intended to deal with. It was pointed out how these sources of supersensible knowledge lie in the human soul, in every human soul itself, in it as dormant forces and abilities, which can be brought forth through appropriate means in intimate inner experience, so that the human being can become able to look into the spiritual worlds. The development of these abilities lying dormant in the soul is to be sketched out this evening. Further explanations of what is to be presented today will then arise in the next lectures.

If the aim is to make it clear how the soul's dormant powers of supersensory knowledge can be brought out, then one can always point to an occurrence, to a fact that happens to every human being in the course of twenty-four hours: to the alternation of sleep and waking. Man usually passes by those riddles of life that play into his life daily as something familiar, and the rare and, because of its rarity, oppressive will in most cases easily evoke a longing to be solved as a riddle. Such oppressive riddles of life will be discussed here in the next lecture. Today, however, we will start from a mystery that eludes man in its mysteriousness only because he is so accustomed to the phenomenon in question, namely the alternation of sleep and waking.

In order to sustain our lives, we must pass from a state of consciousness into one of unconsciousness every day. What happens when we pass into the unconscious state of sleep? The senses lose their capacity to perceive, the organic limbs lose their capacity to move, and thinking, which is bound to the activity of the brain when it is engaged in the external world, ceases. As we fall asleep, we feel all the activities and all the awareness that fill our day subside. It would be a logical impossibility for anyone who judges impartially to think that what surges up and down in our soul from morning to evening in our conscious state as our ideas, our feelings, sensations, affects, passions, yes, as our ideals and ideas, actually passes into “nothingness” each time we fall asleep and then arises again the next morning. Only logical prejudice can deny that man's spiritual and soul essence is also present while he is in the unconsciousness of sleep.

If we assume hypothetically for the moment – and the following lectures are intended to justify this assumption – that while man is in the unconsciousness of sleep, he has, as it were, withdrawn with his actual spiritual-soul core from his physical body and the forces animating this physical body, and that he then lives in a spiritual world , it is not far-fetched to assume that the reason for this lies within the person themselves: that when a person's spiritual and soul essence is withdrawn from their body, they cannot perceive their surroundings in the same way that they perceive them when they use their eyes, their other sensory organs and their brain in the physical world. It is not far-fetched, I say, to think that man's spiritual-soul powers are initially dependent on using the 'ordinary life of the senses and the brain' in order to have a world around them, and that when man, as in sleep, divests himself of the possibility of perceiving through these instruments, they are too low, too weak to really see, really feel and think what they could then perceive.

Such a supposition could only prove to be correct if there really were the possibility of actually drawing forth from their hiddenness the forces which one suspects as weak, for instance if one were able to condense and concentrate within oneself the soul forces which, as it were, are 'thin' in ordinary normal life concentrate them within oneself, so that what a person experiences in sleep would not have to occur when they stop using their senses or their brain, but that there could also be a state similar to sleep, and yet in a certain respect completely opposite to it. This state would have to be similar to sleep in that the person would not be forced, as when falling asleep, but would voluntarily, through his inner powers, through his will, cause himself to withdraw from the senses or from the brain , so that he could be completely awake but not see his surroundings through his eyes, nor perceive anything through the other senses, but bring his eyes and other senses to complete silence. In other words, he would have to be able to completely suppress all sensory activity through his will, and he would have to be able to suppress ordinary thinking, the kind of thinking that is activated in everyday life through ideas about the external physical world. Furthermore, if man could suppress by his own will what otherwise brings him to perceive, he would now be able, in his spiritual and soul essence, not to reach the unconsciousness of sleep, but to concentrate forces that are otherwise weak and thin, so that he can also properly act without his body, outside of his body.

The question arises as to whether what has just been said can be realized in some way. Of course, this can only be answered by the facts that the person evokes in himself, namely simply by the fact that he is able to apply means to his soul through which what has just been characterized occurs. Through the application of such means to the soul, one comes to supersensible knowledge. The path to supersensible knowledge is not one that leads through external means, that requires all sorts of machinations merely existing in the external world, but it is an intimate path of the soul, and everything that has to be done for it takes place in the depths of the life of the soul itself.

Now, if we want to ascend into the worlds that are to explain to us the outer world in which we live, if we therefore want to ascend into the supersensible worlds, there are three stages that we must pass through. A more detailed account of these three stages can be found in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Here, however, they will only be briefly outlined. When describing these three stages, I ask you not to be put off by the words. Some of the words are used today in everyday language for something quite different from what is meant here, and some of them do not sound good in the thinking habits of the present day because they are used for all kinds of things that are recognized imprecisely or unclearly, or even for those that are rightly rejected. This sometimes causes a kind of emotional emphasis when these words are heard. But it is easy to see that this must be so to a certain extent for the things to be discussed here, because our language is there for the external world. Therefore, the words for the designations must be borrowed from the external world and can therefore never fit exactly for what lies outside the external sense world for which language is created.

The first step of higher, supersensible knowledge is imagination, imaginative knowledge. To avoid the misunderstanding that has just been mentioned, I would ask you to understand by imagination only what I will characterize in a moment. The second stage of supersensible knowledge is inspiration, and the third stage is what, when the word is used as we shall characterize it later and not as it is often used inaccurately in ordinary life, can be called true intuition. Outer sense and intellectual knowledge, which we apply in ordinary life and also in the science of the outer world, is related to these three stages of supersensible knowledge as a kind of preliminary stage, so that, when the stages of supersensible knowledge are added, one can speak of four stages of human knowledge.

Now there are many means, and many means must also be applied when it is a matter of rising from ordinary sense and intellectual knowledge to the first stage of supersensible knowledge, imagination, and I will, because there is not would not have time, I will emphasize with all concreteness how the soul must, as it were, use one of the means – you will find others in “How to Know Higher Worlds” – to awaken the slumbering supersensible cognitive abilities in it. One of the means is the so-called meditation.

If we ask ourselves: What is meditation in the spiritual-scientific sense? — we must say: This meditation is the devotion to an idea, to a thought-feeling or to a volitional content in such an intense way and in such a way that it does not happen in ordinary life, but it is suitable for concentrating and condensing forces that are otherwise present in our soul life, as it were, in a diluted form. In this process, it is good, although the opposite is also possible, not to use concepts for such an understanding of the soul that one otherwise gains in ordinary life or in ordinary science. These concepts can certainly be used, but they are not as good to use. The most useful concepts for meditation are allegorical, symbolic concepts. I will develop such a symbolic concept here, which has already been presented to some of the listeners in other contexts. At first it may seem grotesque, paradoxical, that someone would be expected to let what is now being discussed take effect in his soul, but we will characterize later why it should happen. Let us assume that someone forms the idea that he has two glasses in front of him, an empty glass and one partially filled with water. Now he pours the water out of the full glass into the empty one and imagines that, by pouring the water out of the full glass into the empty one, the full glass does not become emptier and emptier, as it does in the external world, but fuller and fuller. This is indeed a paradoxical idea at first, but this idea is meant to be an allegory, and the spiritual researcher should be aware that it is an allegory. It is meant to symbolize, as it were, the nature and essence of human love for our soul. With human love and with everything that falls under the idea of love, it is certainly the case that this source of love is so infinitely deep and so infinitely rich that when we see the fact of love in the world, we must humbly admit at all times: This mystery of love in its true essence is most certainly unfathomable for every soul. And the more we have this sense of unfathomability, the better it is for the content and intensity of our lives. But there is one quality of real love that we can clearly know and emphasize: that is the quality that is symbolically represented to us by the image we have just spoken of.

The person who gives love and acts of love to another person never becomes poorer or emptier through what he does out of love, but always fuller and fuller, richer and richer in his soul life. This quality of love, emphasized, we have before us, as it were, when we imagine the image of two glasses and the pouring of water from one into the other.

We do something similar to what is done in another area of knowledge, and in doing so we arrive at important results for the external sense world. Let us assume that we have a circular plate made of some substance unknown to us. When we look at this circular plate, we can say that what it is as a substance, how the materials are welded together, is initially unfathomable to us. But there is one thing we can do if we want to know something about this disk: we can draw a circle in front of us. Then we have emphasized something about this disk, namely that it is circular, and this emphasized fact is absolutely certain, however little we know about the disk in general. If we think mathematically, we also do it in such a way – and all mathematics is symbolism in this respect – that we highlight some aspects symbolically. This process of creating images that are perceived by the senses and then held fast by the soul is the preparation for imaginative knowledge for soul-spiritual deeds and for soul-spiritual experiences.

If someone were to say: Then the spiritual researcher sets out to bring images and symbols to life in his soul that do not correspond to any truth at all, so he sets out from the outset to think untruth and to bring untruth to life in his soul – then the answer would have to be: But of course the true spiritual researcher is aware that what he brings to life in his soul as symbols does not correspond to any external reality! If for a single moment he could mistake a symbol for some kind of reality, then he would no longer be a human being on the way to supersensible knowledge, but on the way to illusion. These symbols are not meant to represent outer realities, but to live in our soul, to connect and blend with our soul life and to concentrate our soul life on them.

If we are now able to focus so strongly on such a symbol that we use all the power of our soul to let only this symbol live in our soul and to put aside everything that could penetrate us from external impressions, and to put aside all other thoughts , so that we bring only and alone such an image to the center of our consciousness, then such an image is better than an immediate impression of an external reality, because such an impression always draws us back to the external reality with our soul forces, distracting us from ourselves, as it were. But when we have formed a pictorial, arbitrary idea with full awareness that we have something purely constructed, to which we now surrender, it is something that retains reality only insofar as it is borrowed from it. Whatever images we form, we have taken the components for them from external reality. These images are presented in colors, shapes, etc., they are borrowed from external reality, but they do not refer to external reality. This is because it does not happen in external reality that a glass becomes fuller when you pour out the contents.

Such an exercise has the consequence that the soul must concentrate its powers in a completely different way than if it takes what it has otherwise experienced to help it. If the one who wants to go the way into the supersensible worlds has patience and perseverance to practice such concentrations of his soul life again and again, he will be able to have a very definite inner experience. Having this experience is the first step towards imaginative knowledge. He will experience that he has thereby inwardly changed his soul life, and that after some time he can become aware of how such images, such pictures, arise from his soul itself, without him first bringing them about, and arise in such a way that they present themselves to him with all the appearance of reality, as images otherwise only present themselves when we have made external perceptions and formed ideas from them.

In our ordinary external life, our soul's images arise as reflections of external reality, as it were. Through the exercises mentioned, however, images arise from the depths of our soul life, which are only pictures at first, of course. But this is where the elevation of the soul life lies: the soul now feels inwardly strong and can enter a state that is similar to, yet opposite of, the state of sleep. During sleep we abstract from all outer perceptions and also from brain-bound thinking, but we fall into unconsciousness. In imaginative cognition we also abstract from all outer perceptions and from all brain-bound thinking, because we suppress all that. But despite this, the soul does not become empty, does not become unconscious, but images arise from its depths, images that become richer and richer, more and more extensive, and then present themselves to the soul like a new world. This is the world of which it has already been indicated in these lectures that it can be confused by the layman, who is not familiar with such things, and its value can be mistaken for the world of morbid illusions, hallucinations, delusions and the like. But only someone who is ignorant of the facts in this matter, and judges only from the morbid life of the soul, can make such a mistake; for there is an enormous difference between the morbid, even the slightest morbid, representations of this kind, and those that have been rightly won by methodical soul-education.

Anyone who has learned even a little about what are called pathological soul phenomena, hallucinations, illusions or delusions, knows one thing: that those persons who are afflicted by such ideas ultimately believe in the reality of them so firmly that the faith they themselves have in the experiences of the external sense world is nothing in comparison. That is the characteristic of delusions and illusions, that those who are afflicted by them also develop an overwhelming belief in them. There is nothing more difficult than to talk a person out of their delusions – they don't even have to reach the degree of hallucinations, just ordinary delusions, paradoxical ideas. If, for example, a person begins to develop the morbid idea that other people are persecuting him, it is extremely difficult to get rid of this idea by mere persuasion, and it may happen that he constructs the most marvelous logical thought-constructions to prove how right all these delusions are. Man can become obsessed by these ideas, and he firmly believes in the objective reality of such conceptions.

If you now only take into account some of what is said in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you will see that while man brings himself to let such images and imaginations take effect in his soul, at the same time everything is done through the right schooling of the spirit to ensure that, to the same extent as this world of images blossoms in the soul, the belief in them as in an objective reality is expelled from the soul, so that at no moment can the person training spiritually ever arrive at the idea that what arises in him as imaginations is an objective reality. All schooling of the spirit is wrong that does not at the same time evoke in the soul the clarity: What occasionally enters as marvels such as new worlds, has no objective reality in the way it comes over you. Everything is initially there only to inwardly revitalize the soul, to make it richer in itself and, if we want to use the paradoxical expression, more inwardly real, more fulfilled by the real. And that is the best, indeed the only true attainment of the disciple, that he knows: the imaginations that arise are nothing other than a reflection of his own being.

If the spiritual disciple is able to overcome all belief in the reality, in the objectivity of these imaginations of his, in the same moment when he receives them, then the spiritual training is the right one. Generally speaking, it is difficult for many people to accept the one with the other, because by applying the appropriate exercises in his soul, the human being is, so to speak, endowed with a new world, a world of sometimes magnificent ideas. But for many people this is an extraordinary satisfaction, an extraordinary pleasure, something that fills them with deep sympathy. And anyone who tried to make them believe, even in the slightest, that all this is not an objective reality but only a reflection of their own nature, that it is only their own nature expressing itself more meaningfully than before, would be regarded by them as an enemy, as a blasphemer of the most beautiful hopes of the soul. But it must be understood that such imaginations, as they first appear, are not at all suitable for giving real knowledge of the higher worlds, but that they are only a bridge for the soul. For now a completely different task begins for the soul, the task that gradually leads from imagination to inspiration. A struggle begins, as it were, between the soul and what appears as its imaginations. If I am to characterize how this struggle is waged, I must use a simile from ordinary life.

We experience time and again in ordinary life that we do not have all the contents of our soul in our consciousness. Imagine what it would be like if you suddenly had in your consciousness everything you had ever imagined! You could remember ideas that you might have had decades ago. These rest in the depths of your soul and are called up at some opportunity. That means that in ordinary life one has the possibility to forget and to bring the forgotten out of the soul again. One also has the possibility to bring out of consciousness what the consciousness experiences as ideas and to separate it from our conscious life so that it is somewhere in our soul independently of it. The content of consciousness can thus be lowered somewhere, so that it is then out of consciousness.

We must succeed in doing the same thing – even if it is different in this area – with all our imaginations when we become spiritual researchers. We must be able to extinguish every imagination that arises from our soul at will, we must be able to extinguish it at will and bring it into a state where it is thrown out of our consciousness in the same way as a forgotten idea is thrown out of our consciousness, which we can later retrieve. This is necessary. In the whole realm of our imaginations, we must be masters of every single one of them, and we must be able to make each one of them independent of us.

A conscientious spiritual researcher who undertakes such spiritual research and then conscientiously communicates it to the world, does this often and often, again and again, that he repeatedly pushes down what arises before his soul as an image, which has emerged, again and again, making it unconscious, erasing it. Then it comes again, and now not only through arbitrariness, but through something quite different: through an inner power of which we only become aware at this very moment if we are at the appropriate level. And not all imaginations come up, but we have the clear consciousness that there are imaginations that remain down there in an unknown, that cannot be brought up again, or if they do come up again, they show themselves as such, which we reject.

The images change when they come back to us; they are then also something completely different. They reach us in the same way that perceptions of things in the physical world reach us externally. For the same reasons that we, if we have common sense, can distinguish externally between something dreamed and something non-existent and something real and present, we can recognize in its reality and in its spiritual essence what emerges again as imagination.

The question was once asked, when such things were being discussed: How can a person be sure when his imaginations come back to him, which he first threw out of his subjectivity and handed over to objectivity, only to have them returned to him, how can he be convinced that they represent realities or unreality? We know that there are suggestions and imaginations that are so strong that they overwhelm a person, so that he perceives as reality what is not there at all. A vivid example was given: if someone is so sensitive that, without drinking lemonade, he has the taste of lemonade in his mouth just at the mere thought of it, that is an example of something being there that is not really there. So one can also be subject to a similar deception with what the reborn imaginations are.

Such an objection can always be made. It can also be maintained in a mere dialectic, in a mere play on words, but not in the face of reality. For anyone who develops his soul in the way described comes to the same possibility of distinguishing truth and error as one distinguishes truth and error in the external world, where one has nothing but a healthy soul to distinguish truth and error. Everyone can form a concept of this if they think, for example, of Schopenhauer's philosophy with the sentence: “The world around me is my idea.

I do not underestimate Schopenhauer's philosophy, otherwise I would not have published it myself and written an introduction to it. But great minds often make the simplest mistakes. For the sentence “The world is my imagination” is actually refuted by pointing out a completely trivial fact: if he imagines a piece of steel at 900 degrees Celsius and thinks of his fingers touching it, he will not get burned. He will never get burned by such an imagination, no matter how saturated it is. But if the real steel is in front of him, he will get burned. Thus, not through concepts or philosophies, but through experience, he will be able to distinguish reality from imagination. But there is no other distinction. And there is no other distinction in the supersensible realm either, except that through schooling one has acquired the right way of being with supersensible reality.

Therefore, it is necessary for our consciousness to know that When imaginations first arise, they have been created by our soul itself, and so they are only a reflection of our own nature. A person can have the most beautiful imaginations — at first he does best to interpret them in such a way that he says to himself: What hidden state of mind, what hidden passion, what belief or superstition is there in me that these or those images arise before my soul? If he sees nothing in the pictures but the reflection of himself, then he has acquired the right state of consciousness for walking the paths up into the supersensible world. He must then be able to be a fighter against himself, drawing on the inner strength of his soul. He must be able to uproot what he is often most tempted to believe in, what he loves most, what for many people could already mean bliss, and let it descend into a sphere of forgotten ideas. When he has so unselfishly torn from himself what his soul had first created and given it over to the world outside of himself, it comes back to him again as inspiration. Then he is able to live with those entities, real beings and facts of the supersensible world to which such imaginations belong.

At first, such imaginations appear quite familiar to us because we can explore how they are formed not differently than we ourselves are in our soul, how they are only a mirror image of the soul. One can always prove from the world of imaginations that these imaginations are so and so, depending on who we are and on our state of mind. But when they return, it is indeed different. The same images do not return, but different ones do, new ones that we have not been confronted with at all before, and which announce themselves as reality just as external realities announce themselves as such to us. Only one has a completely different feeling about them.

We face the things of the external world in such a way that we stand outside them. A table we look at is outside of us. It is there, and we cannot enter into things. When we have prepared ourselves in the way described, we immediately have the inner experience of consciousness when we encounter the facts and things of the higher worlds: we could only come to them by giving them something that we have first brought forth from the depths of our soul. It is truly the case that, as when an object lies before me and I want to grasp it: as I have to stretch out my hand and become aware of its reality, so too, through that which I first achieve through the method described, I have to separate what then confronts me as imagination from my own ego, and plunge it into oblivion. But in doing so, I extend my own being into a world that I can then grasp.

In the world, one experiences many refutations of what has just been said. But however much one looks around, however much one wants to familiarize oneself with these refutations, one thing always comes to mind: the people who refute what has just been said have not yet understood it. This is evident from the way they speak about it. And anyone who has understood it would never dream of wanting to refute it. Thus one encounters very frequently this supposed refutation, namely, that one hears it said: But these supersensible perceptions that you then have and that you take for impressions from beings that are supposed to inspire you, do not differ after all from quite ordinary illusions or hallucinations! They differ tremendously in that the true spiritual researcher has a different relationship to them, a relationship that allows him to maintain his common sense in relation to these things just as he does in relation to the things of the external world. Therefore, persons who are most unfit to become real investigators of the spirit are those who are superstitious or gullible, those who are termed visionaries in common parlance.

Those who readily accept a truth will certainly not be able to conduct proper spiritual research. Imagination and faith are the greatest enemies of genuine spiritual research, although what imagination is in art, for example, and what faith in reality is, can ultimately be the most wonderful gifts of spiritual research. For what can be investigated in the spiritual can be transformed into imagination and become a work of art. Likewise, when it is said that what spiritual researchers proclaim is something that only appeals to faith, the sentence must apply: the spiritual researcher certainly believes what he knows. But he would truly be a fool if he did not believe what he knows; yet he believes nothing but what he knows.

It has just been said that we have to tear what we have acquired out of our souls, so to speak, that we have to stretch out spiritual organs through them and get back the spiritual reality through them. As we become more and more immersed in such a soul life, we also grow more and more together with the beings and things of the spiritual world. Then there occurs what happens in our consciousness in such a way that we do not communicate with these beings as one person communicates with another through external organs, but through what speaks directly from being to being, what is directly perceived by the beings, in that our soul is directly with the being that perceives it, so that it is, so to speak, not outside of it but in it. Then intuition sets in, which is actually only the conclusion of supersensible knowledge, that supersensible knowledge that does not lead us into a blurred, nebulous spiritual life, but into a concrete, essence-shaped, reality-filled life. There is no other way to truly come together with the spirit and its existence than to merge with it, as it has now been described. But anything with which we do not merge can never be accepted as proof of the spirit, for there is no other proof than to find one's own experience coinciding with the experience of the spirit. Whoever wants to experience a spiritual being must bring his soul so far that he can let his own experience coincide with the experience of this spiritual being.

The entire process of spiritual experience, as it has been described, can make it clear – it would be of no use to obscure the facts, for they must be stated openly – that man can most easily can recognize pure spirits, if I may use the expression, through imaginative knowledge. These are spirits that only have a spiritual body and no other covering than a soul or spirit. Spiritual entities that do not come into embodiment and do not express themselves in outer natural phenomena can be recognized at the level of imagination, when we do not yet have the ability to penetrate to inspiration. This happens in such a way that the imaginations which we have sunk down into oblivion come back to us in a modified form, and we then recognize them as images for spiritual entities, which are as spiritual as our spiritual-soul life conceived without a body.

On the other hand, one must ascend to inspiration if one wants to recognize entities that are connected, for example, with the elements of nature, with the glow in nature, with the warmth in nature, and so on. In short, to recognize the powers and entities that lie behind the sensory world, which express themselves in the external world and can only be recognized there in their external expressions. This is only possible through inspiration. For this, what we have in our soul must be torn out more intensely, so that it dives down, than in the case of beings who have a mere spiritual existence. And the strongest powers of vision must be applied if one wants to recognize those creative powers, which the outer mind consciousness only addresses as the materialistic forces of nature, but which in truth are creative entities.

If we want to recognize these creative entities that lie hidden behind all external existence, then we must be able to tear our inner soul life out of us as strongly as it is the case when we have just ascended to intuition. That means that to recognize through supersensible knowledge the preceding incarnation of a human being in a concrete case is one of the most difficult tasks, for in a human being as he appears to us in the sense world, we are also dealing with something that manifests itself in natural and bodily effects.

Behind these physical effects lies something like creative powers. But for the spiritual seer, this is hidden behind the physical exterior just as the spiritual beings that are present in lightning and thunder and behind all nature are hidden behind them; and one is hardly easier to find than the other. Therefore, it will be found time and again that people who develop intuition tell all kinds of real illusions from past incarnations. Therefore, it is good to pay as little attention to them as possible. The true spiritual researcher knows that this is one of the most difficult things that even the most developed soul can do at any given moment.

What has been said so far relates to the investigation of the supersensible, of spiritual life and activity. By preparing his soul in the manner described, the soul itself becomes a tool for penetrating into the supersensible worlds. But for the spiritual researcher who wishes to communicate spiritual knowledge of the world, the most significant task is yet to come. For this insight into the spiritual worlds is mostly misunderstood and misjudged by people who do not know it in the right way. And this also belongs to the correct assessment of the paths of supersensible knowledge, that the human being is able to form an opinion about what real spiritual knowledge is and what is either nonsense, charlatanry or self-deception.

It must be said again and again: to research in the spiritual world, to seek out supersensible facts and entities, the soul must educate itself to do so. But when a spiritual researcher who has penetrated into the supersensible worlds in the right way describes his observations correctly, using concepts that correspond to a healthy human understanding and a right feeling for truth, then what the spiritual researcher describes can be understood in the right way by every person who does not allow himself to be prejudiced. The prepared soul is needed to investigate supersensible facts and beings, but never to comprehend them. This is, so to speak, the secret of the presentation of spiritual things: that they can be presented in such a way that every soul can understand them, after they have been investigated by the supersensible powers of knowledge.

Now there is a peculiarity: the human soul needs the results of spiritual research to understand the things we will talk about, for example, in the next lecture on 'Life's Questions and the Riddle of Death'. The human soul thirsts to have ideas and concepts about what goes beyond death, ideas and concepts to truly grasp the essence of the soul. And anyone who wanted to refuse to understand the nature of the soul could well suppress for a while what may be called the yearning of the soul for the solution of the riddles of the world. But then it becomes all the more apparent that we may well deny the soul spiritual nourishment, but we cannot suppress the hunger that arises and can drive the soul not only into despair but also into unhealthiness. Man needs, so to speak, for his welfare and for his safety in life, the results of spiritual research, and to make the soul happy in the right way with the results of spiritual research, for this it is only necessary to have common sense. The natural sense of truth is enough to grasp what the spiritual researcher imparts. As long as it is not investigated, it cannot be said. But when it has been investigated and formulated aright, it can be understood.

The truth of this can best be seen from the fact that the spiritual researcher himself has gained nothing for the happiness of his soul, for everything that he needs for his soul in general, from his “vision”. He has a new world. But this new world is of no use to him as long as he has not developed it to the point where it can be used to judge the soul life that we lead in everyday life, and which longs for the solution of the riddles of the world. What the spiritual researcher can get out of his research is of no use to him, quite unlike the other person to whom it is related and who grasps it with a natural sense of truth and common sense. But as regards what the soul needs for its life, the spiritual researcher has nothing through his research, but only and alone through what then comes out of the research and can be communicated to everyone. The spiritual researcher can only be of use to humanity as a whole if he is able to express the results of his research in such concepts and ideas that they can be grasped by the ideas of an age, provided that the latter are sufficiently unprejudiced and unbiased. This unprejudiced attitude is certainly still largely lacking in the present day because people believe that other ideas, for example those of natural science, contradict the results of spiritual science. But if one looks more closely at the results of spiritual scientific research, one will see everywhere that this is not the case.

But still another thing stands between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Precisely what the spiritual researcher is, in that he can see into the spiritual world, is actually widely misunderstood. People make serious mistakes about the spiritual researcher as such precisely when they want to approach or long for spiritual research. In order not to speak at too great length, I will merely remark that the greatest error, especially among well-meaning people, is that the spiritual researcher, because he has prepared his soul to see into the spiritual world, is regarded as a kind of “higher animal”, as being somewhat ahead of other people. But by such a view, the one who wants to come to supersensible knowledge, blocks the way to it the most. It very often happens that out of a certain goodwill, the view is formed that the spiritual researcher, because he can see into the spiritual world, is therefore superior to other people, is worth more than they are, that it is something particularly desirable for the human soul and its value to be able to see into the spiritual world. That in our time this striving occurs in the widest circles, stems from a fact that can be briefly characterized in the following way.

In earlier times we also find communications from spiritual research that were given to people. But mostly only the results were communicated. The methods were not spoken about as, for example, one can speak about them today, or as it can be spread in a public book today, as it is in «How to Know Higher Worlds?» or in my «Occult Science in Outline». For certain reasons, the methods were only spoken of to a few individuals whose certain qualities were quite certain. This was right for older times because there was feeling and sense and also a sense of truth for a larger audience, in order to allow the results to affect the soul and also to make the soul happy, but not enough to overcome the difficulties for the soul to enter the spiritual world.

Today, souls live differently. Today there is the possibility of a completely different way of thinking. Let us just compare how people today can think quite differently, not only through the advanced natural sciences, but also through the ever-advancing education that people learn to think quite differently than was the case in the past. As a result, the age has acquired the ability to judge things better. Therefore, things can be communicated. But this is only just beginning. Therefore, it is inevitable that errors will arise.

It is such an error to regard the spiritual researcher as something special. But man is never, by increasing his knowledge, as it has been described, something that stands out above humanity, which cannot have such knowledge. Just as the chemist is no different from the other people because he knows chemistry, so the spiritual researcher is no different from the other people. It is not through such things that the value of a person is determined, but it is determined within certain narrower limits by intellectuality, by the power of healthy thinking. One person is worth more if he can think well than another who can think badly. And in the most comprehensive sense, a person's value is determined by his morality, by the fact that he performs moral acts and has a moral state of mind. He is not ahead by virtue of a particular training of the soul, but solely by virtue of his intellectual and moral qualities.

For this reason the bad habit, which obscures the paths to supersensible knowledge, should be completely eradicated in those who wish to approach such knowledge: that one considers the spiritual researcher, who is able to see into the spiritual world, to be a special authority because he can do so, and regards him as something special. This gives rise to a belief in authority and a blind following, which are bad enough in other fields, but are most disastrous in the field of spiritual scientific research, for experience shows the following for the practice of spiritual research.

Those who, in the ordinary course of life, have acquired sound, straightforward, logical thinking, just as other people do in the ordinary course of life, also carry this logical, healthy thinking into the supersensible world and are thus able to judge what is real, what is right and what is true, and they alone can then pass on correct judgments to their fellow world from what they recognize. It is not by looking into the supersensible world that one forms correct judgments, but by going into it with correct intellect, with good logic. No matter how much a fool can see in the spiritual world, who sees a whole heap of all possible spiritual things, because he has in some way trained his soul for it, will also tell nothing but nonsense about what it is like in the spiritual world. Whether one comes to the truth depends on one's ability to judge. Therefore, even if a person with good sense is unable to see into the spiritual world, he is always able to judge whether what someone is saying, no matter how much he has “seen” it in the spiritual world, is nonsense or whether it has substance. If someone shows that he cannot think well, that he cannot connect things properly, then, instead of listening to the spiritual researcher, he should rather stand guard over his common sense, for then he will always know whether something comes from a wise or a foolish mind.

Even more important in this regard is the moral state of the soul. Anyone who approaches the spiritual world with bad passions, bad feelings and emotions, but especially with vanity and ambition, will see what is presented to him only in a distorted and untrue way. He will see the worst aspects of the spiritual, and these will present themselves to him in such a way that they do not tell him the truth, but create illusions. The spiritual seer's moral state determines what he can see in the spiritual world. To that extent, spiritual vision itself is not suitable for making people some kind of authority. Rather, we have to pay attention to the way in which spiritual research is prepared, and we must know that we will cause the greatest harm if we do not keep watch with our common sense and only look at what can be objectively judged.

This is the way to judge supersensible knowledge on the part of those who long for such knowledge for the salvation and happiness of their soul. If man relates to the spiritual researcher in this way, then truly this relationship of the world to the spiritual researcher is no different than the relationship of the world to other sciences. Just as not everyone can go to the observatory or the laboratory to conduct research there, so too, although a certain deepening into the spiritual world is always possible today, relatively few can see into it. But this is not necessary either, because the fruits of spiritual knowledge can be understood by unbiased comprehension when they are communicated. This can become the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and his audience, and this is also always the right one in the coexistence of people.

The more we succeed in not taking the spiritual researcher as an authority, but rather relying on our common sense, examining everything, and the more we measure everything the spiritual researcher says against how we see it when we compare it to life, when we apply our common sense in other words, the more we do that, the more we stand on healthy ground. We may well say that spiritual science, insofar as the world needs it, is accessible to every human being today, because it is comprehensible, even if one cannot see into the spiritual worlds. We are already at the point today where it is actually no longer denied to any soul to go the way into the spiritual world. Our age demands that people become more and more convinced that the path into the supersensible worlds can also be taken. This is the right thing to do, in contrast to what leads people to a blind belief in authority. But only what is right has value for the happiness and salvation of the soul.

These are a few suggestions regarding the paths to supersensible knowledge, to that knowledge that really leads us into a spiritual world that lies behind our sensory world and that also enables us to comprehend this spiritual world. The spiritual researcher himself has something of the spiritual world for his personality, for his being, only when he can not only see but can also grasp what he has seen. For everything seen is still of no value if it is not grasped. But when it is grasped, grasped by the characterized common sense and the natural sense of truth, then it digs itself into our soul, connects with it, and our soul feels directly what is in it, as the soul, when it comes before a picture, directly feels what is in the picture, even if it cannot make this picture itself. Just as it is not necessary to be a painter to benefit from a picture, it is equally unnecessary to penetrate into a knowledge that is also necessary for the soul to the highest degree, for example, of immortality or of the passage through repeated lives on earth, or to penetrate this knowledge sufficiently to be able to form these cognitions oneself in spiritual vision — although it would be good if more and more people were to penetrate into spiritual vision. But this is conquered by time, and more and more people will also do so because the necessary, insuperable need will arise to live one's way into the supersensible world. Souls will be more and more compelled to become seers, so to speak, to really grow together with the spiritual world.

But this gives - be it understood self-seeing, be it understood seeing of the other - the possession of supersensible truths, of supersensible knowledge, that our soul knows how we recognize through outer science, how all the outer substances that are present in the whole universe, so that we are embedded in the same that is spread throughout the whole universe. In this way, through spirit-comprehending research, he also learns to recognize that in everything that surges up and down in his consciousness or subconscious, he is connected to a world of spiritual beings that are truly more real than the substances with which the body is connected.

Thus, little by little, man feels the fruits of spiritual research in the peace of his soul, and also feels the power to work and be active in the spiritual universe, in the God- and spirit-imbued universe. But that is what makes man know what he is and have the necessary knowledge for him: that he lives and feels connected to and knows that he lives, resting and active, thinking, feeling and willing in the spirit-imbued universe. And that is what the soul cannot do without, what it seeks when it does not have it for a certain period of time. The soul needs this if it is not to become desolate within itself and, through this desolation, become incapable of working with humanity, so that it would not only despair of the divine but also fall into decadence. But the consciousness of belonging together with the supersensible worlds underlies what instinctively felt in Goethe when he says:

Were the eye not sun-like,
The sun could never behold it;
Were not in us the power of the Godhead,
How could we be enraptured by the Divine?

Well, the eye is solar! The same power that is in the sun is in the eye. Thus, as the ancient philosophers said, like can be recognized by like. There is a divine in man, the whole world is imbued with divinity: thus, the inner divine can grasp the outer divine. But Goethe also recognized that the opposite of this is a truth.

Schopenhauer, although he makes the whole world an appearance of will, is unable to see that what is within us is not only necessary for the knowledge of the external world around us, but that, conversely, the external world is also necessary for the existence of the internal world. According to Schopenhauer, the sun only exists because we have an eye. This is how the peculiar philosophy arose that regards the world as soundless, as cold, and so on, and that all this only begins when the human organs enter the world. But Goethe knew the right thing: that not only do we see things by having eyes, we hear sounds by having ears, but that an eye can only arise because the sun is there. From a once eyeless entity, man has become a seeing being because light fills space and brings forth the eye from an organism that did not yet have an eye. The power of the sun created the eye through the light it spread. So it is not important that we carry the divine within us and, for example, in Fexerbach's sense, we only project the divine that we have first created within us into the world, but we must know that we would not have this “sense of God” within us at all if the divine-spiritual did not fill the world and create a spiritual organ in us, just as the outer sun created the outer eye.

Therefore we can say: The consciousness of the belonging together of soul and world, which gives the soul strength and power and lets it rest and be active in the spiritual universe, is composed of two things, two things of which we can characterize one with the beautiful Goethean saying:

If the eye were not itself the sun,
The sun could it never see;
Were not in us the power of God himself,
How could we be delighted with the Divine?

But it is entirely in the Goethean sense when we, complementing this one-sided truth with the other, which only makes it the full truth, add the other saying, which may be:

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could the eyes of beings flourish?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to be filled with God?