Results of Spiritual Research

GA 62 — 3 April 1913, Berlin

13. Morality in the Light of Spiritual Research

When Plato, the great Greek philosopher, wanted to define or characterize the divine, he called it “good”. And Schopenhauer, who in many respects strove to emulate Plato, once said in his writings that he could call his philosophical view an “ethics” much more than Spinoza was allowed to do, because he, Schopenhauer, had based his entire world view on the primal power of will and thus made something that is connected with the innermost moral impulses of the human soul the fundamental power of the universe; while Spinoza, according to Schopenhauer, had constructed his system in such a way that the highest principles of the universe did not yet contain morality, ethics, as such.

Schopenhauer wanted to imply, as did Plato – and many philosophical worldviews have done the same – that everything we call moral in the development of mankind is so intimately and deeply rooted in this development of mankind that one could not even think that the realm of the moral does not ultimately include all purely natural events, that the realm of the moral does not underlie everything that man can fathom in the natural or spiritual world as the fundamental principle and the fundamental essence of things. Thus, in the sense of such philosophers, the moral in man would be an inclusion and illumination of the divine-moral that permeates the whole world. And this would already indicate that any elevation in the sense of a world view to the very foundations of existence would naturally always bring man ever closer and closer to the sources of the moral world impulses.

Even if one does not completely agree with such philosophical world views, one can still say that such world views, precisely to such an opinion, to such a view, as it Plato and Schopenhauer is arrived at by their perceiving the full dignity and significance of the moral in the development of humanity and not wanting to lose the moral impulses in the depths of the existence of the world. Even if one does not completely agree with such world views in theory, one can still learn from them and find it justified that any world view that is to have an impact on human life and action must, so to speak, appear justified before the judgment seat of morality, must appear in such a way that morality can say an unconditional yes to it. Therefore, it is a necessity for every worldview to come to terms with the moral impulses of existence. The theme of today's reflection has been chosen from such foundations and will deal with the relationship of what is meant here as spiritual science to the moral principles and impulses of the human soul.

Now, when approaching moral matters, a certain, one might say sacred awe for the field one is entering is necessary from the outset for a reasonably sensible approach to things. For one enters the field of speculation that seeks to make the most profound judgments about the worth or unworthiness of the human soul, and one immediately senses when entering this field that one is reaching into the unfathomable depths of the human soul, into such unfathomable depths that one would not want to be light-hearted in this field and have some final judgment at hand. In this respect, too, Schopenhauer made a significant and often quoted remark: “It is easy to preach morals, but difficult to explain them.” What did Schopenhauer mean by this saying?

That it is easy to preach morals is something that is obvious as soon as you take even a brief look at human life. For there is hardly anything else that is preached so much in this human life as morals. Nothing is more often judged than the moral worth or unworthiness of the soul. And if you look at this human life thoroughly, you have to say again: how little the actual sermons are suited to really reach into the souls, so that they would grasp these souls in such a way that the moral principles that one or the other means, even if they are clearly understood, can also be real moral impulses in the souls! Yes, how easily some people preach morality to themselves when it is very difficult for them to follow truly moral impulses. Schopenhauer says that everything that can be preached in terms of principles, moral formulas or moral prescriptions is actually meaningless. In his view, it is only meaningful if one can show a soul force in the human soul, a spiritual impulse that is precisely a reality in the soul and from which moral action arises. Then one would be able to say that one had pointed to something in the human soul that, if one only leaves it to itself, pushes one to moral action; then one would have found the reason for moral action in the soul. Then you have established morality, because you have clearly explained the real impulse in the soul. Then you have not just preached morality.

Now, with such a demand, which is as justified as possible, one realizes how difficult it is to penetrate into those depths of the human soul where the moral impulses really lie dormant, where those impulses reside from which the moral or immoral arises. It is difficult for our judgment to penetrate into these depths. Let us consider a specific case, a case that can teach us how difficult it is for a conscientious soul to reach a judgment about the moral worth or unworthiness of a human act. Let us assume that some important personage gets on a horse and rides out. On the way, this important person finds a poor woman squatting by the side of the road. This person, galloping along on horseback, sees the woman, reaches into his pocket, takes out a full purse, and throws it to the woman.

Now we have an action before us. The question now is: How do we want to judge such an action in the light of morality? Herman Grimm, whom I have already mentioned, says the following about this act, which really did occur once upon a time with a world-famous personality: Let us assume that the woman was superstitious and that the case was such that the woman had just intended to commit a theft in the near future for her children, who are in the most bitter need. The fact that the man's purse fell into her hands saved her from committing theft and from bringing even greater misery upon her family. But she is superstitious, says Herman Grimm. Why shouldn't the woman say: Through this man, an angel from the higher worlds has appeared to me, and thereby I have been saved from the abyss.

Here we have a kind of moral treatment through these things, which could well have happened in this woman's soul. But let us suppose, says Herman Grimm, that the person who threw the full purse to the woman later comes into the company of various people. The first person to hear from this person himself that he has done this thinks: Well, I have always heard that this person is extremely stingy; now I see how unimportant such judgments are everywhere! And now, says Herman Grimm, such a personality could go the extra mile for this man and could, as it were, contribute to a rectification of the rumor about the stinginess of that superior personality by spreading the word about the generosity of this personality. But suppose, says Herman Grimm, a second person heard the same thing related and felt quite peculiarly affected by it; for this person, suppose, had only recently wanted to borrow a much smaller sum from that man than was in his purse, and the man had not lent him the sum. Will this person not judge quite differently? Or a third person — says Herman Grimm — might be present who, on hearing this, would be prompted to say: Yes, I am in a fix; can't I get something myself? Such a person might now again come to a judgment that would be quite different from that of the woman, as well as from that of the other persons. A fourth personality might perhaps know, when the incident is related, that the man in question had an enormous amount of debt at that particular time, and this personality will see the act in a completely different moral light. He might say that it is a great wrong to throw the purse away like that without further ado when one is obliged to pay one's debts, which creditors are always waiting for. Another person might know, says Herman Grimm, that the purse did not belong to the man himself, but to his wife, and that the man had carelessly thrown his wife's purse away, and the woman might complain of her husband's carelessness. And still other points of view would be possible.

Thus we see how people who start from different points of view could judge such an act quite differently and would not need to meet what lived in the soul as the true impulse. Herman Grimm is particularly concerned with this case because he wants to show how much moral judgments are to be received with a certain reserve when they come to us through such an important personality, for example in memoirs. All such judgments could come to us in memoirs, because the whole thing I am presenting here really happened in a similar situation, namely with the great poet Lord Byron. And in his discussion of one of his biographers who was acquainted with Byron, Herman Grimm comes to speak of the case. He is mentioned here because it is a very good illustration of the whole range of life judgments that we have gained in very different ways when we set out to judge some moral act of a human being. Thus, it must indeed be said that, while it is difficult, in the general sense of Schopenhauer, to establish morality, it becomes downright impossible, in the individual case, to approach a person's inner life with a conclusive moral judgment in such a way that this conclusive moral judgment would truly apply to the facts of the case. But one should not, on the basis of these premises, arrive at a judgment oneself, as if one had to be indifferent to morality. On the contrary! Those who grasp life in its entirety will nevertheless regard morality as the most sacred thing in human life and thereby come to the conclusion that the most sacred thing in human life must at the same time be treated with a holy awe. For it is in many respects presumptuous to confront another person with a moral judgment, considering how much separates one soul from another. Having made these assumptions, let us now consider what has been said about the nature of spiritual science in these various lectures. On the one hand, spiritual science leads us deeper into the spiritual foundations of things. But at the same time we have seen how it is able to do this: it is possible because we expose deeper forces of our soul life, so that we grasp the spiritual foundations of the world only by bringing up the forces slumbering in the depths of the human soul. Thus, it is precisely by means of the methods of spiritual research that we approach the deeper foundations of the human soul, those foundations from which moral impulses often arise in such mysterious ways. And the question must be: What happens when, in the depths of the soul, those researches that seek to bring these depths to light encounter the moral impulses? After all, in the ordinary everyday life of the physical world, it is the case that the moral impulses can speak with great certainty from the depths to the simplest human soul, to the most uneducated human soul. And many a highly educated person, many a person who perhaps counts himself among the philosophers or is a scientist, can be put to shame in the moral realm by a simple personality who does not call much of her own in terms of knowledge, and who, nevertheless, is able to perform the most self-sacrificing acts of genuine human love in the most difficult cases, from the depths of her soul. Ordinary knowledge, outer physical cognition, certainly does not need to lead down into the depths from which the moral impulses arise, the impulses from which morality is to be established.

But now it immediately becomes apparent when spiritual science wants to ascend to the spiritual sources of existence, that then, in a certain way, when the human soul wants to become a spiritual researcher, it must develop three things. This threefold nature has been presented in the course of these winter lectures as the three stages of supersensible knowledge. First, we have mentioned what we call imaginative knowledge, that is, the knowledge that arises in the human soul when it has completely freed itself from all sense observation and all intellectual activity that is bound to the instrument of the brain. When the soul has reached the point where it feels a world of images emerging from its depths, then, with further training of the spiritual researcher, these images will become images of the real spiritual realities that exist behind the external sense world. Imaginary knowledge is the first. These stages of supersensible knowledge are also discussed in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.”

The second stage that the human soul must reach — such things can only be expressed in a pictorial way, and all this has already been said, but to avoid misunderstandings it will be briefly repeated today , consists in the fact that what first appeared in images, but which cannot be compared with the images of a single sense, appears as it were of itself through a “language of the world” as inspired knowledge. This means that when the spiritual researcher's capacity for inspiration is awakened, the spiritual beings and facts that lie beyond the world of the senses speak to him.

The third stage, by which the spiritual researcher truly penetrates into the essence of spiritual facts and entities, is called intuition. Not the intuition that is sometimes referred to by this word in trivial language is meant, but something that is a real stepping over of one's own soul life into the nature of something foreign, whereby the person, by connecting his being with a foreign being, becomes able to penetrate into the inner being of spiritual beings outside of himself. Thus, on other levels of knowledge, imagination, inspiration and intuition are juxtaposed to what is sensory knowledge and intellectual knowledge.

Through these three stages of knowledge, the human soul penetrates into the spiritual world. The powers of imagination, that is, of seeing images from the supersensible world, as well as the powers of inspiration, that is, of hearing what the spiritual facts and spiritual beings of the supersensible have to reveal to us, and the powers of intuition, they slumber in every human soul. They are brought to light by the methods also described here. The human soul must therefore penetrate into its depths as a spiritual researcher in order to arrive at the very foundations of existence.

Now, as already pointed out, especially when the “Fallacies of Spirit Research” were discussed, the starting point from which the soul reaches those levels of its existence at which it can look into the spiritual world is of great importance. It was particularly emphasized that a kind of powerlessness occurs in relation to the knowledge of the spiritual world in the case of that soul which does not take its starting-point from moral excellence, from moral mood. Such a soul will show a certain stupor for the higher worlds and will only be able to reveal that which has been seen as if through a kind of stupor, and thus it will be falsified. The connection between the moral state of mind at the starting point and what the soul can attain when it really enters the spiritual worlds through imagination, inspiration and intuition has already been pointed out. But we can characterize the significance of the moral state of mind for the higher levels of knowledge even more precisely.

For the spiritual researcher, imagination arises in such a way that images emerge, as it were, on the horizon of his consciousness, first from his own soul life and then from the general spiritual life. These images, which arise in this way and whose significance we have already described, must differ depending on whether the person starts from this or that soul disposition, which he already has here in the physical world. A soul that develops a sense of the right, true connection between facts here in the physical world will, when it ascends to imagination through the methods described, carry the inner constitution for the true connection of things with it into the higher worlds. Therefore we can say that a soul that truly knows how to live within the facts of the physical, sensory world carries its truthfulness with it into the spiritual worlds. But a soul that is characterized by inaccuracy — and, as already mentioned, there is only a small step from inaccuracy to error, and even to mendacity —, a soul that is characterized by inaccuracy , in regard to the sense data of the physical world, brings with it into the world of emerging images from the mind an inner disposition of untruthfulness. And the consequence of this is that out of their untruthfulness, which does not agree with the world but arises only from their own inner being, they build up a world of images that is itself only an emanation of the personality concerned.

Thus, where the soul ascends to the realm of imagination, untruthfulness will cause such a soul to reveal nothing from the spiritual worlds but what is only a reflection of its own untruthfulness. Therefore, it is valid, in spite of all training in the spiritual world, that the soul, before entering the imaginative world, must, in preparation for imaginative knowledge, already strengthen itself here in the physical world through what may be called a sense of fact. And it must be emphasized, sharply emphasized, that anything that detracts from the sense of fact cannot provide proper preparation for the contemplation of the spiritual world. It will be a good preparation for anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher to hold back as much as possible from all merely personal and subjective criticism, from judging things only “from his point of view”, from asserting: “I think that is right”, “I think that is wrong”. Rather, a good preparation for spiritual knowledge is to try, as much as possible and as much as one can, to let go of judging everything only from one's personal point of view, to let go of asserting one's personal subjective point of view; to endeavor to let only the facts of life speak when faced with them. Therefore, we will find that the one who is on the right path to the spiritual world does not present his judgments on things in everything he tells or describes, but lets the things speak for themselves, in that he will endeavor to put together only the facts.

Therefore, when we meet someone who says at every opportunity: This or that has happened here or there, I find it distasteful; something has happened there or there, I do not like it; this or that has occurred, I find it ugly, I find it beautiful – and whatever the gradations may be, such a person is not on the right path to penetrating the spiritual worlds. He is much more on the right path when he endeavors to suppress such judgment and simply tells the facts, when he looks at the facts and lets them speak for themselves and makes it his principle: If I impose my judgment on someone, then it is just my judgment. Then he is not only instructed to believe me that what I say is the truth, but also that I have a judgment. But if I set out to tell someone what I have encountered here and there, then he can form his own judgment. The more we force ourselves to look at the world and tell things the way we found them, the more we equip ourselves with a sense of fact and prepare ourselves for imaginative insight. Those who want to prepare themselves for imaginative knowledge should, above all, get out of the habit of thinking that they have to say, “I see things this way or that way” with every experience. They should consider it unimportant what they can find about things and should endeavor to be only the tool through which things or facts speak.

If we bear this in mind, we shall realize that one essential virtue, truthfulness, is one of the right preliminary means for a methodical training for the knowledge of the higher worlds. We shall not be in the least embarrassed to doubt that a proper training for the knowledge of higher worlds is morally beneficial, or at least must be. Indeed, the matter can be presented from yet another point of view. One can assume the case of someone who does not prepare himself for the higher worlds through the truthfulness just described. Then, if he only undergoes the appropriate soul training, the appropriate exercises, the slumbering powers of his soul can indeed be awakened, and in the end he can be brought before an imaginative world. But what is this world then? This world is then nothing other than the mirror image of his own being. And because the moment you look away from the sensory world, when you also look away from the mind that is tied to the brain, you have this imaginative world as something real in front of you, regardless of whether it expresses something real or whether it is only the mirror image of the nature of the person who has it, then anyone who is not properly prepared by truthfulness will also have an “imaginative world” in front of them, because it pretends to be a real one and yet is only the mirror image of one's own soul, of one's own inner being. This world is then a constant temptress of untruthfulness. Therefore, one can say that someone who does not penetrate the spiritual world through the practice of truthfulness puts himself in a situation where temptations to untruthfulness and lies are constantly present in his surroundings when he perceives in the supersensible world. From this the conclusion must be drawn that every ascent into the supersensible world must be connected with the cultivation of the virtue of truthfulness, with the cultivation of the sense of fact above all. For only when we have a sense of fact, a sense of the context of facts in the physical world outside us, can we educate ourselves to be truthful.

In a similar way, the same thing applies to inspiration, only in this area it becomes even more vivid and meaningful. Through inspiration, the spiritual realities that are present in our environment begin to speak to us, as it were; they reveal their essence to us. We do not hear them through voices and sounds similar to those of the external world, but we hear them spiritually.

Now another preparation is necessary so that the person does not merely perceive what his own being reveals to him, but so that he gets to know an objective, real world. For this, it is necessary to enhance a very special virtue of the soul. Such things can only be ascertained through experience. Anyone who wants to attain inspiration must develop the virtue of moral courage, steadfastness, and fortitude, in a higher way than is necessary for the ordinary world. For only someone who has moral courage, who does not shy away from anything that may endanger his own personality under certain circumstances, will be able to withstand what speaks to him through inspiration from the spiritual realities. And anyone who has developed too little strength of mind and moral courage before entering the spiritual worlds will very soon notice – or rather, he will not notice it so easily, but others who understand something of the matter will notice it – that although certain things from the spiritual world speak to him, all that speaks to him is only an echo of his own being. Because his soul is not strong enough, because it does not have full support in itself, it cannot keep what it is, but radiates it, and what it itself is comes back to it. A soul that is not prepared for inspiration by moral courage will very soon present itself as one that hears something like 'spiritual voices', but these spiritual voices will be nothing other than what it carries within itself, which is only an echo of its own being. When such a soul then comes up with the fact that it is so, then it will be all the more depressed by what comes to it from the spiritual world. So we see that again an essential quality of the soul, a quality which cannot be denied the moral character, must be strengthened and fortified if this soul wants to penetrate into the supersensible world: moral courage, fortitude. This is necessary as a preparation for real inspiration. From this it can easily be deduced that it is above all necessary to strengthen one's moral courage in the physical world before one wants to become a spiritual researcher, so that the soul can really perceive the revelations of that which is given through imagination, also through inspiration.

Many a person who did not understand the matter thoroughly enough believed he could rely on the moral courage of this or that soul, and then gave the soul the means to ascend into the supersensible world. After some time, they met the soul — and it betrayed nothing but that it reflected only its own nature, which it interpreted as “sounds” and “words”.

Thus, spiritual training is intimately connected with the increase of moral strength, and therefore every correctly imparted spiritual training will, above all, work towards strengthening and stabilizing the moral strength. Therefore, wherever you find a description of the methods by which one can penetrate into the higher worlds, for example in my writing “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” you can also find indications of the necessity of strengthening the moral power. For the moral power must not remain as it is in the ordinary life of the physical world, but it must be increased and strengthened.

What is necessary in this respect becomes particularly evident to us when we turn to intuition, through which the soul of one who has become a spiritual researcher is able to empathize with the innermost being of another spiritual being or another spiritual fact. We shall find that it becomes almost impossible to really put oneself in the place of other beings after the spiritual training if one has not already taken care here in the physical world to increase what one might call one's open interest in everything that surrounds us, free, open interest. All narrow-minded closed-mindedness of the soul, all hiding of the soul within itself, everything that does not want to direct the attention of the soul to compassion and sharing in the joys of fellow creatures and of everything that already surrounds us in the sense world, all this keeps the soul from coming to true intuition, to true knowledge of higher beings when it has ascended into the spiritual world. And here we are in the realm where our considerations touch on what Schopenhauer calls his “Foundations of Morality”.

Schopenhauer was by no means a spiritual scientist in the sense in which spiritual science is meant here. Therefore, for him too, the soul, when it descends into its depths, does not separate in such a way that it develops a trinity of powers corresponding to the three stages of knowledge — imagination, inspiration, intuition — but rather everything merges for him. The “soul” is a nebulousness of all the powers living in its depths. Thus Schopenhauer cannot dissect the moral virtues, either, the development of which must be the preparation for a spiritual education: a sense of fact as the basis of the virtue of truthfulness for the imagination, fortitude as the basis for what leads to inspiration, and the third - which Schopenhauer thoroughly discusses - that slumbers in the depths of the soul and that one can call general interest in the environment and surroundings. But Schopenhauer draws attention to something else, and here he is, in a sense, deeply ingenious. He draws attention to what is in fact one of the few soul qualities and soul impulses that already show in the physical world how an underground connection, as it were, exists directly between soul and soul. Schopenhauer draws attention to compassion, one could better say to sympathy. One need only mention the word compassion, compassion, of which Schopenhauer says that it must be present in every soul that can be called moral, and one will feel, firstly, that compassion touches something that is in fact connected to the innermost moral impulse, to that which can really establish morality. On the other hand, one will feel that with the word compassion one has touched something that is an intuition already present in the physical world, a putting oneself into the other soul. For anyone who can look at the world sensibly, proof that there is a physical connection between soul and soul, proof that the spirit with its powers exists between soul and soul, is what can be designated by the word compassion.

Schopenhauer is right to call compassion – and many others who have looked into these things have done the same – the real mystery of the human soul, which can already be observed here in the physical world. For there is something infinitely profound when a soul, enclosed in a body, feels something that makes another soul rejoice or causes another soul to suffer, so that in the passing of the forces of one soul to another, a kind of spiritual mystery is already present here in the physical world. That is why Schopenhauer says: No matter how much morality is preached, it is based on the life of one soul in another soul. Morality is only based on compassion or pity. Therefore, it is quite true to say that there is as much morality in the world as there is compassion. Schopenhauer was right to point out that it would be unbearable to hear the sentence: “This person is virtuous, but he has no compassion.” Schopenhauer means: Everyone will feel the impossibility that such a sentence could be pronounced, that virtuousness and lack of compassion could be combined in one soul. So Schopenhauer thinks it is unbearable to hear the sentence: “He is an unjust and malicious man, yet he is very compassionate,” although one can say that the inner workings of the human soul are sometimes so confused that one can also experience this, how someone can undoubtedly perform very bad, unvirtuous deeds and yet develop a certain feeling, for example, for pigeons and similar animals. On the whole, however, it can be said that Schopenhauer touches on the depths of the moral justification here when he speaks of compassion.

If one speaks in terms of spiritual science, then one must expand the principle of compassion somewhat, and then what appears before our soul is what can be described as sympathetic interest, as sympathetic attention for everything that happens in the environment around us. For true, inner interest in a joy that is experienced is not felt by a person who cannot experience this joy, and true, deep interest in the suffering of another being is not felt by a person who cannot suffer with it. In many respects, compassion, empathy and interest coincide. To have real, true interest is to have love. Because you cannot have interest without having love in the true sense of the word, without having compassion.

Now the right preparation for intuitive knowledge here in the physical world is the one that aims to strengthen the soul by getting the soul used to taking an interest in everything that lives, breathes and is, to being able to pay attention to everything that surrounds the soul. The deeper our interest can be, the better we prepare ourselves as spiritual researchers for the intuition of the higher worlds. Therefore, it can be said that, especially for spiritual science, the radiance of compassion in the physical world appears as a reflection of the fact that the deep forces of the soul that lead to intuition can only develop truly and correctly if the soul prepares itself for this through a real interest in the world around it, that is, through love and compassion.

Thus we see everywhere that the right way to train the mind is inseparable from that which is at the same time the most important moral virtue of man. For in loving with interest, in attentively looking at all suffering and all joy, at all being in general, in the soul's steadfastness of character and in truthfulness, lie, so to speak, the most significant, indeed the most fundamental moral virtues. Anyone who wants to understand any virtue, for example a virtue such as loyalty undoubtedly is, will easily be able to get to know it as a special form of steadfastness. A person who is steadfast will also know how to be loyal in the appropriate way. All virtues, one might say the scope of virtues, will be traceable in a certain principled way to these three qualities of the soul.

Now, if the relationship between spiritual science and morality is to be described, it must also be pointed out how man, when he really arrives at the contemplation of the spiritual world, whether through spiritual training or whether he merely accepts what spiritual research offers him, comes face to face with a world that makes very special demands on him, demands that will certainly encompass what the soul needs in terms of confidence, hopes, strength and so on. But there comes a point when the soul is face to face with itself, when, in full self-awareness, it has stepped out of its personality, as it were, and entered a world that no longer contains only its personal interests and intentions. On the path to spiritual research, our soul comes to the point where it faces its personality, where it faces the being that it has been up to now. It has already been pointed out that in spiritual research, this confrontation with the being that one has been up to now is referred to as the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, the threshold that separates the supersensible world from the ordinary physical world. It is only with this Dweller of the Threshold that one realizes what one is, what one has hitherto called one's personality, one's interests, what one has willed, what one has felt as something connected with sympathy or antipathy. All this confronts one like an alien being, emerges from within. One looks at it like an alien being and learns to say: “You have spoken all this so far. Now you have it before you, and it shows itself to you as a different being; you are beside yourself. It is the same with the feelings, with the will of the human being in the moment of meeting the Guardian of the Threshold. When one experiences this, one also knows how strong all the magnetizing forces are that draw one to the personality that one was and that one must actually leave.

That is the significant experience, here earlier called distressing, that one realizes: Yes, one must let go of oneself, but this being that one was, that one is facing, does not want to let go of one, it draws one to itself with a hundred and a hundred forces. And if you succumb to these forces, you cannot free yourself from what you have previously called “yourself”, and so you cannot enter the spiritual world. By getting to know yourself, you get to know the bond between the higher world, between the higher powers of knowledge that are always dormant in man, and between what you are in the physical world. Theoretically speaking, this breaking away from oneself could appear easy. When this event is experienced, not only experienced through schooling of the mind, but experienced through what man can recognize through schooling of the mind, then it becomes apparent that these magnetically acting forces cannot be overcome so absolutely by judgment, but that with the breaking away from oneself, the strength of the fettering forces also grows, so that one feels: Everything that wants to pull one back becomes stronger the more one breaks away from oneself. One notices more and more what draws one to the ordinary personality, and one also notices more and more how necessary it is to have gained strength beforehand to resist these magnetic forces. That is to say, one must actually precede the actual entry into the spiritual world with such a strengthening of the soul's powers in the good, in the moral, such a leaning towards what the spirit demands of us, that one can resist the temptations of the lower personality with a stronger power than is necessary in the physical world.

Thus one becomes aware only when one stands before the characterized harrowing event, how every approach to the spirit is at the same time an approach to moral demands. Thus one has again through experience something that justifies Plato, the great Greek philosopher, when he calls the divine “the good”. When we are confronted with natural phenomena, we will gain a more accurate judgment of them the more we refrain from moral judgment of them. Who would want to judge a salt crystal or a plant that is stunted in its development morally because of that? In the ordinary physical world, the natural and moral world order converge, so that one only senses the depth of the moral world order when one realizes that one is only really admitted to the spiritual world with moral strength. Therefore, it is considered a principle of the spiritual world, and this is again an experience: anyone can come to the Guardian of the Threshold; only those who pass him through their moral strength can pass him. But anyone who only gets as far as the Guardian of the Threshold and then has to go back, will then have a spiritual world before him that is only the mirror image of his own inner world. So someone can believe that he has a whole spiritual world before him, and can also fool other people with what he thinks he has before him as a spiritual world. And other people can believe that it is a spiritual world that corresponds to the truth. If he has not been able to pass the Guardian of the Threshold through his moral strength and through his moral state of soul, then his spiritual world is not permeated by truth, not by objectivity. Therefore, it will be self-evident that every real knowledge of the spiritual world will give such a presentation of the spiritual conditions that, through the way it is presented, not only preaches morality in the soul, but also justifies morality.

This is especially evident when we consider what has been frequently presented here from the most diverse points of view as a necessary insight of spiritual science: the life of the human soul through repeated earthly lives. Everything we are in one life forms the causes for the qualities we have in the next life. And the way we are in one life is determined by the qualities we carry within us, the effects of previous earthly lives. A soul that does not develop a sense of fact will, through this lack of sense of fact, prepare such causes that in the next life form the predispositions for a soul that shows a predisposition for untruthfulness from the outset. Untruthfulness, so to speak, practised by such a soul life, produces predispositions for untruthfulness for a next life on earth. Truthfulness alone, practiced in a soul life, produces the ability for the next earthly life, in the external talent for truthfulness, so that if one shows truthfulness as a necessary preparation for spiritual training, at the same time one points to something that, beyond death, for the next earthly life, makes the soul more moral than it was before.

If, instead of fortitude, instead of moral courage, a certain inner indifference develops in the soul, a certain inner lightness, a certain shrinking from the need to face the truth in the soul, from the need to assert what one has recognized as true and right , then, because this affects inspiration, a soul in which this education to fortitude is neglected will, through this very life, as it were, create causes that have an inspiring effect in the next life and make the soul there a self-seeker, an egoist. Selfishness in one's life is, as it were, inspired by the previous life, in that moral courage did not prevail in the soul in the latter life. And practicing indifference to the outside world, lack of interest, inattention, selfishness, has the effect of sending, as it were, an intuition of this present being to the next embodiment , into the next incarnation, and intuit this in such a way that the next life bears the fruits of it, that is, that it then already produces an alienation from the environment in its predispositions, a disconnection from the environment.

But what does it mean in the human soul to be 'alienated from the environment'? Oh, it means a great deal. Those who are alienated from their environment, who are not adapted to it, are affected by it in such a way that it makes them constantly ill, and this then affects not only the soul but also the body. Pathological, unhealthy tendencies are sent into a following life, as if by intuition from a previous life on earth, because the soul goes through life without interest and inattentively. Whatever is more soulless in an embodiment - a lack of interest, a lack of compassion for the world around us - goes deeper into the next incarnation, into the physical being, and appears as unhealthiness.

Thus, when we consider the moral foundations of the human soul in a spiritual sense, we see that we are actually touching on what is active in this human soul, what is present in it as impulses, in that the soul lives its way from one life to the next and builds up the new life according to what it has brought with it as causes from the previous one. Thus morality becomes the formative power from one life to the next, and we preach not only morality, but we show what morality does, how it works as a power in the human soul, and then indeed all those objections that are sometimes raised with an apparent right against spiritual science fall away. It is often said that when spiritual science speaks of repeated lives on earth in the sense that karma will balance out in a future life the joy or suffering a person has experienced, it is based on a certain selfishness. But if we do not quibble over words, but look at the essential point, if we do not merely want to preach morality but to found morality, then it must be said that in order to become ever more moral, the soul must become ever more perfect, that is, the inner impulses for its perfection must be shown. It must therefore be shown how moral impulses are related to the perfection or imperfection of the soul. If, then, the aim is to show the relationship between spiritual science and morality, then we can say: this spiritual science is most certainly justified before the justified demands of morality, because it must incorporate the moral demands into its most significant demands. Indeed, it justifies in a certain way those impulses that prevailed with a thinker such as Plato, who designated the divine-spiritual as the “good”, by showing how the spiritual can only endure what is good, that is, it must be intimately related to what is good.

Thus spiritual science may be regarded as something that contains within itself, not in an external way, but in an internal way, the principles on which morality is based. And in addition to much else that we shall have to speak of in the next lecture, spiritual science has much to give to man for the inner support of his soul, for the health of his soul, for all the strength he needs for work, for the security to hold one's own in the outer life and to penetrate to what one's task is, to all this spiritual science can add something that is an important addition to the conception of human life, that is to satisfy the human soul. At the beginning of this lecture, we pointed out how morality and moral judgment point to those depths of the human soul where the soul stands in holy awe of the other soul because it is aware of the difficulty of penetrating to where the moral impulses lie in the soul. If we have seen, then, that he who speaks of moral principles in life touches those unknown depths of the human soul, before which we must stand with the highest respect, then we must say that any unauthorized intrusion into this human soul is itself immoral. If morality presents us with each of our fellow human beings in such a way that we immediately sense that we we stand with the moral judgment before the depths of his soul — so spiritual science shows us that these depths of the human soul, when they are strengthened, when they are strengthened and made firm, do indeed lead up into the objective spiritual world, only then making the soul a fellow citizen of the spiritual worlds.

That, then, which we regard with awe in our moral judgment, proves at the same time to be the only thing that actually has the “passport” to cross the threshold behind which the spirit rules with its secrets. But that draws our attention to the nature of the human soul, to the kinship of the human soul, where it takes hold of itself in its depths, with the good spirit. And this is something that life makes understandable to us in that deep sense, that we must then say to ourselves – even where we cannot agree with the moral behavior of a human soul that comes to meet us, even where we must harshly condemn its behavior – that we may say to ourselves, by looking at the human soul's passage through repeated lives: Yes, even in the depths of the human soul, which we may even, justifiably, morally condemn, there lives something that makes it akin to the spiritual world, if only it wants to penetrate into its depths and become aware of the sources of morality in its depths!

Thus, the spiritual-scientific view of morality reconciles us with what we can call the true value of the human soul. It puts the words into our mouths that allow us to accept, in the face of much that we need – in the strength of joy and abundance, in the strength of spirit and soul, in the consolation for many of life's sufferings – that there is much in every situation of the human soul, even if this soul is not aware of this or that, where the soul may say of itself: However hidden it may be, there is something in me that professes good! And this contributes most when the soul needs strength to sustain itself, contributes most to the strength of life and to the strength of work, when the human soul, despite many aberrations in the moral realm, can still say to itself – and it can say this to itself when it recognizes itself through spiritual science – what Theone says in the drama 'Helena' by the Greek poet Euripides:

I want the good of nature, and love it,
because I must respect myself.