From a Fateful Time
GA 64 — 23 April 1915, Berlin
14. Self-knowledge and Knowledge of the World from the Point of View of Spiritual Science
The first thing the soul needs to get to know its own nature scientifically, not just by faith, is a sharp concentration of thought that appeals not only to ordinary thinking but also to the application of inner willpower in imagining and thinking. The thoughts that penetrate us from the external sense world cannot help us with this. If we seek the immortality of the soul, we must think differently. Outwardly these thoughts resemble those mental images, those inner experiences that are destined to be forgotten. We can see this in the experience of 'dreaming'. Why? Because the dream engages the physical body in a much less intense way and thus creates less opportunity to feel and experience the dream as reality. It is the same with our free thoughts, which we let pass through the soul; we call them musings and quickly forget them. But the more one trains oneself to unfold the power of retaining freely formed thoughts, as otherwise only experiences supported by memory, the more one approaches the concentration of thoughts. Thoughts as images of external reality are least suitable for this. In the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have set forth thoughts that are suitable for concentration.
If one wishes to hold fast to such freely-generated thought-images, one must exert a stronger will than in ordinary life. The experiences of everyday life are so coarse that they cannot serve as a basis for comparison. What spiritual science reveals as immortal is fundamentally different in its meaning from what we feel and want in everyday life. Man passes by heedlessly, all the more heedlessly because he is inclined not to ascribe reality to that which confronts him as the being within himself, which finds the way through birth and death.
It is easy to see that this inner being exists, but it is not easy to ascribe the most intense reality to it. One must speak again and again about immortality from different points of view, because only when one has characterized it from the most diverse points of view is it possible to gain a true idea of it. The reality of immortality must be grasped by soul forces that are brought forth from within. Now you might say that I maintain that only subjectively something can be achieved! — The beginning of spiritual research is indeed subjective: an inner overcoming, a working one's way up from darkness to light. This is certainly subjective, because most people lack the patience to go far enough with spiritual research and to develop themselves out of the most personal of personal realms. It is precisely through this inner struggle that the soul is driven to work itself out of this realm; then it can enter into a world that is revealed to it. But the path from subjective to objective spiritual research is an intimate one, which makes it necessary for the human being to acquire soul habits within himself that otherwise do not occur in everyday life. We have to develop little willpower in our everyday life to hold on to it, but the other requires a strong tensioning of the soul's inner powers. They have to be drawn from the deeper soul life. These are strong inner energies that otherwise remain untrained in everyday life. People who need the support of sensory experience soon become exhausted and fall into a state not unlike that of falling asleep. When a person has developed thinking united with the will over a long period of time, when they have strengthened their inner life of imagination to such an extent that they are completely absorbed in it, when the rest of the soul life sinks away, the world flows away on all sides, the soul becomes completely one with what it has attained in a healthy way through practice: only then does man realize what the power of thought is, and how it must be supported by strong will if it is to rule freely in the inner life. Then, after months and years of practice, certain experiences begin to occur. At first, he succeeds in concentrating more and more brightly, clearly and intensely. He notices that the thought-experience grows ever stronger, and he feels that his whole consciousness is heightened as it merges with the thought.
Then comes a critical moment when he has arrived at the experience of the full strength of the thought. The thought fragments and dissolves in the soul, darkens and ceases to be present for us. We feel our whole being going with the thought. This is not easy. This experience shakes up all the human soul forces, calling into question everything one has previously held to be valuable. One resists coming to terms with this experience. Human egoism does not allow the forces associated with the depths of the soul to enter into consciousness. If we do not exert all our willpower, we will not be able to do so. In the subconscious, we fear that something much worse could happen to us than physical “death”. The materialist says: compared to physical death, the experience would not be so bad after all! But it does not enter into ordinary consciousness in this way; it takes hold as an impulse of an elevated consciousness compared to the ordinary life of the soul. It is not fear of the destruction of the body, but of the outpouring of one's own being into the cosmos. These are unspeakable feelings, yet they can be called feelings of fear. If one overcomes them, then an experience comes that could be described as follows: By developing these forces, you pull something out of the body. This seems particularly dangerous. It is a feeling as if something were being pulled out of us, as if it remained in us and yet had to be pulled out. There is a clear awareness that something else must be pulled out, that it is not possible with thought concentration alone, that this only pulls out a part of us.
If we want to understand how a person arrives at these descriptions, we must start from everyday experiences. The person must enter into a new relationship with themselves, develop a much more precise self-knowledge. In ordinary life, nothing is as questionable as a person's relationship with themselves, the opinion they have of themselves. How inadequate man's self-knowledge is can be seen in numerous examples, such as in the story of the philosopher Mach: when he got on a bus and saw his face in a mirror, he wondered what kind of ugly schoolmaster it was, until he realized that he was seeing himself.
It is easy to laugh at such things, but they are deeply indicative of man's questionable relationship to himself. Man must seek to come into a relationship of self-knowledge with himself. He has accumulated the forces that prevent him from detaching himself from what is connected with his inner life throughout his entire life. But this must be added to the concentration of thought: that we gain a completely different relationship to what constitutes our destiny. In everyday life we see fate approaching us. It strikes us as sympathetic and antipathetic coincidences; we regard what happens to us as something external. Even ordinary reflection can teach us that so-called coincidences are not so external. If we look at what we are at any given time in our lives, such a look will be able to tell us, if we do not want to close ourselves off from real knowledge of human nature: that we would not be able to do this or that if this or that had not happened to us eighteen or twenty years ago.
We see how the whole bundle of our talents, gifts and habits of soul life grows out of our destiny. We look at ourselves concretely as a fifty-year-old person and try to follow the whole tangle of experiences of destiny. If one is serious about this, which does not happen too often, then one must say to oneself: Destiny is not external; I am in it, my I is in it, I go along with my consciousness and pour myself out into the stream of my destiny. — This must become a method, it must be added to what has been achieved through concentration of thought. We are within ourselves in our everyday thoughts; through thought concentration we go out of ourselves and believe we are losing ourselves in it. The reverse process occurs when we identify with fate: we go into something that flows to us in the outer stream; we grow together with something that we believed was outside us. What I believed to be experiencing as external fate, I was already in it; I brought it about myself. When such considerations have become habitual, we come out of ourselves again, draw our soul after us; a very hidden inner man is drawn out of us. In that in which we know ourselves to be living, we look as we usually look at tables and chairs in the outer life. In this way, we have two means of experimenting here that we would otherwise use in a physics laboratory or in a clinic; but these are not external experiments, but rather activities that relate to inner soul experiences.
Anthroposophical spiritual science does not speak in a general, abstract way about the fact that one can separate from the body, but speaks experimentally, as one speaks of the fact that oxygen can be separated from hydrogen by showing that oxygen is in the water. In the laboratory we can be relatively indifferent to the things we are dealing with, but it is not the same with the tragedies of the soul, with the struggles, with the inner disappointments when we are on shaky ground or have lost our footing. This is often dreadful, often blissful. Then, when the inner soul is separated from the body, it knows that what is now outside of it contains all the forces that begin with birth and are given back to the earth with death. It has grasped the eternal core of the soul at the same time as the destiny of man. She knows that what separates from the physical body every night is this eternal soul core, which just does not perceive itself in ordinary life because it does not have the powers to do so. At the same time, she has grasped what goes through birth and death and has united it with destiny, with what was given in the spiritual world and then flows through the forces of heredity through father and mother and through the formative forces into the physical body, what has been prepared in the spiritual world for new bodily life. The immortal life core, which is otherwise imperceptible, becomes more and more concrete and alive. In everyday life, one works all this into the life core, but continually darkens the formative forces if they remain the formative forces of the body and cannot be used as powers of knowledge. The body is not their cause, but their effect, which has descended from the spiritual worlds. It bears within itself the character of previous earthly lives. This is how it is now because it is not the first time that one has lived in the physical body.
Spiritual research does not pursue the eternal essence through abstract theories, but through a spiritual experimental method, which, from one earthly life to the next, is subject to fate. It will take a long time before a larger number of people will take part in spiritual science, but it will become a truly real part of human spiritual culture and will intervene in human life and in what moral impulses are, in the life of consciousness in one's own being. Then spiritual science will intervene when the prejudices that now still seem comprehensible will have been overcome. They will be overcome as radically as the former prejudices against science. People believed that what they dreamt up was reality, and they called it an error. They called Copernicus a fool because he said that the Earth revolved around the Sun, whereas common sense told them that the Earth stood still. Today, the five senses do not want to believe that by grasping the heightened thinking, one can draw out a piece of the inner man and draw the other piece by entering into destiny. Humanity will have to learn to no longer trust the senses. There is a stronger power of holding for true than relying on the five senses and the mind. This power is connected with all impulses of human wisdom progress. One must develop trust in this by kindling a strong moral power in the soul. When man appeals to the powers of realization in himself, he will carry himself courageously through the world, not merely trusting in what he can experience through the outer five senses. Today, we have reached the point in the development of humanity where science must become what it could not become before. What the spiritual researcher distills out was always in man: he does not create it, he only calls it into spiritual knowledge.
An obvious objection, which comes from mental laziness, is: Why do we care about the eternal soul core at all? He is eternal, we will live in it again. — That is too cheap a thought. Two things must be said against it. Firstly, it is not only important to man's moral sense that he knows this or that, but that the process of development on earth progresses from natural science to spiritual truths, which were first unknown and are now being brought out. All human progress is based on this. Those who do not want to take part in this should admit that they are indifferent. This point is important, but more abstract. Secondly, however, there is a very concrete progress. In ancient times, people on earth were essentially not the same as they are today; their souls were different from today's. We find there a clairvoyant consciousness originating from primeval times, from ancient epochs, in connection with the divine-spiritual forces of the world. Today, man has lost this; but he is taking his independence out of this earthly world to which he has connected himself. Now that man has attained the stage of detachment from earthly thinking, he must again be seized by spiritual life, must again enter through spiritual science. Today, however, we can say that we still have so much inherited strength that the soul's life after death cannot be stopped. But man must develop in such a way that he does not go through life between death and a new birth in dullness, but in clear experience. Man became free by breaking the thread that connected him to the spiritual world. Now he must tie it again. From the present time on, there is more and more necessity to recognize spiritual life. Therefore, where spiritual life has become more intense in recent times, repeated earthly life as a teaching occurs. For example, in the eighteenth century, in Lessing's 'Education of the Human Race', which he left behind as a testament to humanity, the basic idea of repeated earthly lives and a purely spiritual life in between occurs. There are those who say that Lessing had grown old and weak and that is why he had this complicated idea.
What was established by a mind like Lessing's forms a kind of predisposition that must be further developed in the German national soul, in order to flow into the stream of spiritual scientific research, in order to become real science, as was indicated today. This lies deeply as a predisposition in what Fichte felt to be the original source of German uniqueness. Fichte's idea is a wonderful one, in the sense that Not only when we have passed through death do we become immortal; already in the body we can perceive what is immortal and forms the body. Only in grasping this actual immortal do I recognize the meaning of life, for the sake of which everything in this mortal body may live itself out. What spiritual research is to carry out scientifically is present here as a predisposition. Fichte expresses it: if only the right powers are released, then the immortal can be grasped. Spiritual science is particularly present in the personalities of spiritual striving, which I characterized yesterday.
We encounter glimpses of it in the most diverse places, but here it is a straight line from German spiritual striving to what must develop into spiritual science. In the stream of Central European spiritual life, consciousness in grasping the spiritual core has never been completely lost. I will now draw attention to just one example of this consciousness, which only wanted to be given in a delicate way. Herman Grimm, an art lover and one of the intellectual giants of the second half of the nineteenth century, who stood firmly on the ground of Schiller's and Goethe's world view, expressed it in his novella “The Songstress”. In the 1860s, the time had not yet come for spiritual science, but the people who were immersed in it at that time felt the need to describe not only the sensory world but also the other part of the world. They knew that if you want to describe true reality, it is not enough to describe the sensual world. Take, for example, a horseshoe that has become magnetized, which still looks like an ordinary horseshoe. Man belongs to the spiritual world with his spiritual part, just as he belongs to the world of sense with his physical part. Out of the deepening of German idealism, these people knew how to develop a genuine spiritual worldview. They did this by objectively and impartially observing German intellectual life, which has a mission that should be fulfilled from within, out of an idealistic appreciation of intellectual life: to penetrate to the spirit as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel did, but to do so by still perceiving the world with the real spiritual eyes and ears that Goethe spoke of.
Where the view is directed towards German spiritual research, especially towards Goethe, a kind of hope for humanity is connected with the development of this spiritual life. If one reads between the lines of German spiritual life, one can often find a concise expression of how the world can come to an understanding of spiritual life precisely through the development of the German being. There is no need to be seized by pride, but one can feel how what the Goethe-Schiller era produced can be defended in Central Europe today so that it can develop.
Based on this fateful sense of time, I would like to present two images: We learned in the first days of August 1914 how the news of the coming event was received in the various countries of Europe. First in Germany. One stands before the great event – the Reichstag is convening – I do not want to go into day-to-day politics, not into what is related to the military events – the representatives of the various party directions stand there – and remain silent. That is a powerful impression, as if it were the herald of what was to come, before a great coming truth.
With a kind of inner weeping, one looks at the other picture, at the meeting of the State Duma. There was no silence: they all spoke – so that one gets the impression that it was formally convened, like a historical theater performance. The frenzy of false enthusiasm was spoken by many, in contrast to the silence further west. If you want to explore history, what runs through humanity, you will have to look at such moods. In this silence lies the confidence that trust can be placed in spiritual power, in spiritual truth, that it must be well guarded, that it must be defended – a confidence that carries the soul beyond death and destiny.
Emerson wants to describe Goethe and points out what Goethe culture means for humanity. Referring to him, he says: “The world is young. Great men of the past show us the way with the words: ‘We must write scriptures that bear witness to the eternal. It must not be that a lie remains for us.’ Emerson means that lie that there is no spirit behind the external world.
A bright solar horizon must develop out of the twilight of current events, heralding a lasting peace for the good of humanity. All that those who make the sacrifice of their lives have to endure in body and soul must become a warning for those who remain behind. The unspent forces of those who must leave their young lives before their time will help: the law of conservation of forces also applies in the spiritual world. In the future, we will know that this world is connected to the spiritual world. These unspent forces will be real forces for people who will have an awareness of the spiritual world.
The spirit world will remain closed to you,
unless you recognize within yourself
the spirit that shines in the soul
and can become a bearer of light for you
in the depths and heights of the world.