The Eternal in the Human Soul

GA 67 — 28 February 1918, Berlin

4. The Spirit, Soul, and Body of Man

Anyone who picks up a popular or scientific book today in search of information about the relationship between the human spirit and soul and the external physical organization will usually encounter something like the following analogy: That the sensory impressions that humans receive from the outside world are, in a sense, telegraphic messages that are transmitted via the nerves, like wires, to the central station of the nervous system, the brain, and from there are sent out again into the organism to evoke the impulses of the will, and so on. As appealing as such a parable or a similar one may seem to some today, it can nevertheless be said that such a parable is basically only intended to conceal the helplessness in the face of the great mystery of the soul and spirit, which can be summed up in the words that characterize the subject of today's consideration: the spirit, soul, and body of the human being.

Now, I have already indicated in previous lectures that today's considerations in this field suffer from a fundamental deficiency. Precisely when one approaches such a consideration from the standpoint of the scientific approach, which has been so successful in other fields, one still encounters the impossibility of overcoming the prejudice that confuses the soul life with the activities of the actual spirit life in the human being. Today, soul and spirit are almost universally confused in scientific, philosophical, and popular thinking. Such thinking today is indeed still akin to a chemist who wanted to analyze a composite substance and imagined that that there must be two elements, two partial substances, in this composite substance, who then acts entirely under this prejudice and, as a result, cannot produce anything proper because he does not take into account that the investigation can only be fruitful if he proceeds on the basis of a threefold structure.

Thus, investigations today often remain fruitless — apart from the fact that they are also fruitless for many other reasons — because people do not want to renounce the prejudice that human beings can be considered without taking into account their division into the three entities, if I may call them that, or into the three elements of body, soul, and spirit. I have already indicated in an earlier lecture that what is meant here by spiritual science is to build a bridge from the soul life to the spirit, just as physical science and biology are concerned with building a bridge from the soul life to the physical being of the human being. Once again, I would like to draw attention to what I have already indicated in order to explain what is actually meant. Soul experience, in the broader sense, is undoubtedly — even if soul experience in this case is based on physical and bodily foundations — when human beings feel hunger, thirst, satiety, the need to breathe, and the like. But no matter how much one develops these sensations, no matter how much one tries to make hunger greater or smaller in order to observe it inwardly and psychologically, or no matter how much one compares the feeling of hunger with satiety and the like, it is impossible, through this mere inner observation, through what one experiences spiritually, to discover which physical, bodily foundations serve as the condition for this spiritual experience. In the manner familiar to you, the bridge must be built by scientific methods in such a way that one moves from mere mental experience to what is happening in the physical organization of the human being while this or that mental experience is present.

Similarly, however, it is impossible to arrive at any fruitful view of the human being as a spiritual being if one merely wants to remain with what the human being experiences inwardly and psychologically in his or her life of imagination, in his or her life of feeling, in his or her life of will. Imagination, feelings, and impulses of will are, after all, the content of the soul. They ebb and flow in everyday waking life. One sometimes tries to deepen them by moving from mere everyday soul experience in imagining, feeling, and willing to a kind of mystical immersion in one's inner being, to a deepened experience of what the soul can experience in this direction. However, no matter how far one may go with such mystical contemplation, one cannot arrive at a spiritual understanding of the human being through such mysticism, however subtle it may be. Rather, if spiritual understanding is to be sought — admittedly from the other side, but in an equally serious scientific manner — a bridge must be built from mere soul experience to spiritual experience, just as in the field of physical science a bridge is built by serious, rigorous methods from soul experience to physical processes, to the chemical or physical processes that underlie the feeling of hunger, the feeling of satiety, the need to breathe, and the like. Now, of course, one cannot proceed in the same way from the soul to the consideration of the physical organization of the human being as one proceeds to the consideration of the spiritual life of the human being. Other methods are necessary here. I have already pointed to these methods in a general way. Of course, the details cannot be discussed in a short lecture. You will find them in the books I have mentioned several times, How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science, in the books The Riddle of Man, The Riddle of the Soul, and so on. But today I would like to introduce some remarkable characteristics of those methods that can bridge the gap between ordinary human soul life and the spiritual essence of human beings.

First and foremost, there is one thing — which I have already pointed out from other perspectives in these lectures — that many contemporary researchers of the soul believe that certain things are simply impossible, even though they are essential goals of spiritual research. How often do we hear researchers of the soul say today that the actual life of the soul cannot be observed? It is pointed out, for example, that delicate feelings cannot be observed because they slip away when one approaches them with the observing activity of the soul. It is rightly pointed out how disturbed we feel when, for example, we have learned something by heart, recite it, and want to observe ourselves. This is presented as if it were a fundamental peculiarity of the life of the soul. But it is necessary to realize that what is presented as an impossibility, as a characteristic inability of the life of the soul, must be striven for precisely as a spiritual scientific method. What the biologist and the physiologist do for the body, the spiritual researcher does for the spirit, striving to rise from mere everyday and mere mystical self-observation to that true observation of the soul whose impossibility is to be demonstrated by the aforementioned reference to the fact that we cannot observe ourselves when reciting a poem because we disturb ourselves in doing so. Now, it is not necessary to achieve self-observation in such external things as reciting memorized material, although this is also a necessity for those who want to become spiritual researchers. But it is necessary for the researcher of the spirit and soul to achieve real self-observation by actually having a sequence of ideas, a sequence of thoughts, and also the sequence of impulses of the will and states of mind before him in such a way that, in a sense, while this is taking place in his soul, he stands by as his own spectator and really learns to observe himself inwardly, learns to observe himself in such a way that the observer and the observed actually fall completely apart. This possibility is often presented as something very easy, and those who present it as something very easy, although they naturally do not strive for it in all its difficulty, are also those who believe that, while natural science is subject to strict methods, spiritual science is something that can be attained easily and lightheartedly. However, true spiritual research, which is able to say what is important for spiritual life, requires the same methodical, rigorous, patient, and energetic progress in a certain way, albeit applied only in the spiritual realm, and not only as happens in the external field of natural science, but in such a way that those who are familiar with both natural science research and spiritual science research must say that, compared to the often years of effort necessary to arrive at serious spiritual scientific results, the methods of natural science can basically be acquired in a much easier way.

A foundation for this true self-observation is created by attempting to methodically and correctly introduce the inner will of the human being into the life of imagination. This leads to what can be called, in the true sense of the word, not in a dark, mystical sense, meditation, meditative inner life. In our ordinary everyday consciousness, we are not at all accustomed to such meditative life, since we arrange the sequence of thoughts entirely according to the course of the outer world with its impressions; we let one thought follow another, depending on how the outer impressions follow one another. The sequence of outer impressions gives us the thread along which our thoughts run. On the basis of what a person has then acquired as life experience or even wisdom, they regulate their inner life, their train of thought, so that they then come to be able to follow their thoughts from within. But all this can at most be preparation for what is meant here. This must be achieved through slow, patient, energetic work. It is achieved by first exercising caution in bringing such regularity and yet, I would say, such arbitrariness into one's thoughts that one can be sure that in what one practices in this way, nothing of mere reminiscence is at work, nothing that can arise from any more or less forgotten worlds of imagination, life experiences, and the like. Therefore, it is necessary that those who wish to engage in spiritual research familiarize themselves with such a pursuit of ideas, which they prepare for themselves in a clear manner, or which they obtain from here or there in a clear and professional manner, so that at the moment they devote themselves to this course of ideas, they can truly say: I can see how I link one idea to another, how I influence the course of ideas through my will.

All this must be brought to the point where it is nothing more than a preparation for what is actually to come into being for the soul and spiritual life. For although this must be carefully prepared in this way, at a certain point in development it becomes something objective, a reality coming from the spiritual world outside. Only those who devote themselves carefully to such inner exercises for a time — how much time is needed varies from person to person — through which they introduce the will into the world of ideas, through which they come to say to themselves: I do not allow the ideas to follow one another according to their own laws or according to laws taken from outside, but I bring that regularity into my life of ideas through my own will, whereby one idea is linked to another — gradually brings it to the point , once they have introduced arbitrariness into the sequence of ideas and overcome it again, to discover something within themselves that, just as necessarily, links one idea or thought to another from the spiritual realm, thus evoking an inner soul life dominated by a spiritual reality. Just as external observation regulates the life of imagination and, by basing ideas on the sequence of external events and the characteristic properties of external entities, introduces necessity into the ideas so that they become mediators of external reality, so the life of imagination gradually becomes a mediator of spiritual reality. One must simply recognize what is meant here in the same sense as something seriously scientific, like natural science, and not succumb to the prejudice that one thereby falls into some kind of fantasy, because one does indeed enter into an inner arbitrariness, and realize that in this way one can grasp something spiritually alive, something spiritually real, which approaches our imagination from the other side, as the side that corresponds to external physical reality. For those who have not dealt much with such things, it is indeed difficult at first to imagine what is actually meant by these things. But these things, which are to form the basis of a future spiritual science, which are to provide a future spiritual scientific method of research, are, just like the scientific work done in the laboratory and so on, nothing more than more refined forms of the activities that otherwise take place in the outer world. These inner activities, if I may use the expression, of the spiritual researcher are nothing other than the continuation of what the soul life otherwise accomplishes in order to establish the relationship between human soul life and spiritual life, which is actually always there, but which is brought more or less into consciousness through these exercises.

I would like to start with something that may be easier to understand in order to characterize what I actually mean. Anyone who engages in all kinds of reflections on this or that human or other life situation can, if they gradually acquire a feeling for it, discover differences between the representations of one person and the representations of another. They will find that one writer may be quite learned in what they say and may apply their particular method quite strictly, but that the way they say things is actually quite far removed from what is really happening in the nature of things. In contrast, with another writer, one can often say, without perhaps being inclined to examine what it is all about: simply by the way he talks about things, he is a person who is close to things, to their inner essence. While reading his lines, it conveys something that brings one really close to things. Here is an example:

One may have many objections to the kind of art criticism practiced by the inspiring and likeable writer Herman Grimm, but if one has a feeling for it, even if one often disagrees with some of Herman Grimm's statements, even if one finds him amateurish compared to what strict scholars have to say, one must admit: There is something in his writings that draws you to the works of art, to the artists, even to their personal character. There is, I would say, something atmospheric in Herman Grimm's writings that immediately transports you from what he says to the essence of what he is talking about. One may ask oneself: How does such a mind come to distinguish itself in such a characteristic way from others who may be quite learned? For those who are accustomed to not talking about such things in general abstract terms, but rather to seeking real reasons for such a phenomenon, the following may then become apparent: For example, at one point—but you can make similar observations in other places in Herman Grimm's writings—where Herman Grimm talks about Raphael in a very beautiful essay, you will come across a few sentences that may sound provocative and annoying to those who are dry, pedantic, sober scholars. Herman Grimm says what he thinks one would feel if one encountered Raphael today, and how one would feel quite differently if one encountered Michelangelo today. — Isn't it true that to talk about such things in a scientific treatise is, for some, a pipe dream from the outset? Of course, one can certainly understand such a judgment. In Herman Grimm's work, you will find such strange remarks in numerous places. One might say that he indulges in certain conceptual contexts from the outset, knowing full well that they cannot be realized in immediate reality, and of course he does not mean to say anything special about external reality with such remarks. But anyone who has repeatedly indulged in such trains of thought would have—not in this area, of course, because in this area such trains of thought lead nowhere—but in other areas, in other points of his consideration, the result that his soul forces have been set in motion in such a way that he can look deeper into things, express them more accurately than others who disdain such “unnecessary” trains of thought. That is what matters, and what I would like to emphasize.

When one engages in trains of thought within oneself, solely for the sake of producing these trains of thought, merely to set one's thinking in motion, to set it in motion in such a way that it has a possible relationship to reality, and if one refrains from wanting anything else with these trains of thought than to bring one's thinking into a certain stream of development, then what one is doing initially leads to nothing else than to a becoming more mobile of one's thinking, to a becoming more mobile of the soul's abilities in general. The fruit of this then becomes apparent in completely different areas of consideration. One must be able to strictly separate the two. Those who cannot do this, who want to grasp something real with such a setting of thinking in motion, who want something other than first preparing their thinking in order to then penetrate into reality, will fall into fantasies, daydreams, and all kinds of hypothesis-making. But those who have the self-control and self-discipline to know precisely that such a setting of the mind in motion initially has only subjective significance, those who then set in motion the power that works in the soul from such an activity of the mind, will reap the fruits of this at a completely different time. Starting from this point, Herman Grimm was truly able to make historical remarks in his treatises on Macaulay, Frederick the Great, and so on, which closely resemble what spiritual science has to say about the life of the human soul and the human spirit. I do not mean to say that Herman Grimm was already a spiritual researcher; he himself rejects that idea. Nor do I mean to say that what I have characterized in him is more than something that can already take place in ordinary consciousness. Developing something like this, pursuing it further and further, leads to introducing the will into the life of imagination and grasping the spiritual necessity in the life of imagination. To do this, however, something else must be added.

I have also already pointed out that in the development of the spiritual researcher, particular importance must be attached to his ability to devote himself to the so-called limits of knowledge. Du Bois-Reymond speaks of seven world riddles that man can face as limits beyond which human knowledge cannot go. When human beings say two things to themselves at such boundary points, these become the starting point for spiritual scientific investigations. The first thing is that one must first feel in one's inner life what such a boundary question actually means. On such occasions, I like to draw attention to real, genuine seekers of knowledge. One example is Friedrich Theodor Vischer. When he dealt with the important topic of human dream fantasy, he came upon such a boundary question. He said to himself: If one considers the relationship of human soul life to human body life, one must say: It is quite certain that the soul cannot be in the body, but it is equally certain that the soul cannot be anywhere outside the body. Anyone who develops such a way of thinking, who strives for knowledge not according to conventional, academic methods, but according to the inner, necessary currents of the soul, will in many cases come to the conclusion that they must say to themselves: You are at a point where all the ideas that have come to you from your sensory observations, from your entire conscious life that takes place day after day under the influence of sensory observation, cannot lead you any further. One can now, as so often happens in the present day, stop at such boundaries and say, well, there is a limit, and man cannot go beyond it! One is already deceiving oneself by saying this. But I do not want to talk about that. What matters is that it is precisely at such boundaries that one tries to penetrate with the full life of the soul, that one tries to live into a real contradiction that presents spiritual-soul reality to us, just as it presents itself as external contradictory reality when a green leaf appears on a plant one moment and a yellow petal the next. In reality, contradictions also realize themselves. When one experiences them, instead of approaching them with logical thinking, with one's usual, sober judgment, when one approaches them instead with the full, living inner soul, when one allows a contradiction to play itself out in the soul itself and does not approach it with the prejudice of life and try to resolve it, then you notice how it wells up, how something really sets in that can be compared to what I have done in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (On Soul Riddles).

When a lower living being initially has no sense of touch, but only an inner surging life, and gradually encounters the outside world, what was previously only an inner surging life develops into a sense of touch — this is a common scientific concept — and the sense of touch in turn differentiates itself, so that, in a sense, the collision of this inner life with the outside world gradually becomes an inner experience itself. This image of the sense of touch can be applied to the spiritual experience that must occur in the spiritual researcher. Faced with such limits of knowledge, he allows them to live out in his soul, allowing them to have their own validity. Then it is as if the inner life does not encounter a physical outer world, but rather a spiritual world, and a spiritual sense of touch really develops, then differentiates further and wants to become what, in a figurative sense, Goethe called the eyes and ears of the spirit. However, there is a long way from dealing with such borderline questions of cognition to what I have called seeing consciousness in my book “The Riddle of Man.” But this seeing consciousness can be developed. That is one thing to consider.

The other thing is that, precisely in such inner spiritual-soul activity, one learns that one must not try to penetrate the spiritual world with the power of judgment gained on the basis of observation of the sensory world, not even in the negative sense of saying that human cognition cannot go beyond itself at this point. Rather, one must refrain from entering the spiritual world with what one had in one's soul before one prepared oneself through these and similar exercises to truly enter the spiritual world. This requires a certain resignation, it requires renunciation. While people are generally accustomed to using what they have conquered in the outer world to formulate hypotheses and all kinds of logical conclusions about what might or might not be beyond physical experience, the spiritual researcher must make it not only an inner conviction, but — and I say this explicitly — an inner intellectual virtue not to use what comes only from physical-sensory reality for the characterization of the spiritual world, for the contemplation of the spiritual world. This renunciation must first be acquired; it must become a habitual quality of the soul, so that one refrains from making mere hypotheses or mere philosophical discussions about what lies beyond physical-sensory observation. One then struggles to the realization that in order to penetrate the spiritual world, the soul must first make itself ripe for it. What gradually develops through the full establishment of this intellectual virtue, supported by the introduction of the will into the life of imagination, as I have described, leads one to be able to practice the self-observation I spoke of earlier, which really enables one to be, as it were, one's own spectator while thoughts, feelings, and impulses of the will are taking place. Only through such true self-observation does the human being come to develop a spiritual activity which, as he knows from experience, is not performed with the help of the body, but is performed by the human being standing outside the body with his true self.

This is an idea that, it must be admitted, is quite unfamiliar to worldviews that draw their firm roots from the soil from which, almost exclusively in the present, worldviews want to draw their roots. For everything in these worldviews tends to deny the possibility that human beings can develop a soul life that is independent of the body, and when the results of self-observation are presented in this way, they are criticized with what has been gained from the outer world or what has resulted for the power of judgment from this outer world. This is not acceptable. Misunderstandings upon misunderstandings are created for the simple reason that all spiritual research must be based on the exact opposite of what must underlie the scientific way of thinking, even though spiritual research is structured entirely according to the model of scientific research. Thinking and the methodical development of thinking in experimentation and so on are arranged in such a way that human beings apply the scientific methods developed by their power of judgment and understanding to eavesdrop on the secrets of nature, so that through their understanding they bring things into this or that connection, whereby they express their essence, their secrets. This is quite natural on the basis of scientific thinking. But the same power of thinking and imagining that is used to develop all kinds of scientific methods is used in spiritual science to prepare the soul so that it can then observe what the results of spiritual science are. This serves to prepare the soul so that it can observe the phenomena of soul life in a way that is completely free from the body. In this way, the human being can move out of the soul into the spirit, just as he is moved out of the soul into the body on the other side by scientific methods. So that one can say that the whole nature of demonstrative, judgmental thinking must become different in spiritual science. It must not be omitted, but what is achieved with it is not a consideration of reasons and consequences in the same way as in external science, but rather an ability to observe, because the methods of external science have first been applied to the development of the soul itself.

Thus, the spiritual researcher prepares himself at the beginning, using the same means by which science otherwise arrives at its final result, to be able to observe spiritually, so that the spiritual appears to him as an experience, just as the physical-sensory world appears to the outer senses. This brings about what I reluctantly call clairvoyant observation of the spiritual world, reluctantly because even today, when one speaks of clairvoyant observation of the outer world, reference is often made to older abnormal states of human soul life, and one deliberately or unintentionally confuses the serious, rigorous method of spiritual science with all kinds of pathological and dilettantish methods through which humanity today often seeks to penetrate the spiritual world. I will speak more about such things in the lecture on “Revelations of the Unconscious.”

One now comes to observe the life of the soul in such a way that the observation does not remain merely in the soul experience, but points to the spirit. I would like to mention two points first, although they could be multiplied a hundredfold, but they are important key points. By coming to true self-observation in this way, which is carried out outside the body and thus faces the spirit, the human being arrives at a direct observation of not only the relationship between ordinary waking and ordinary sleeping, but above all of what the phenomena of waking up and falling asleep are. It is still the fate of spiritual science today that it not only speaks of things that are largely unknown today, but that it must speak in a completely different way than is usually done about things that play into the consciousness of every human being, things that are actually familiar in everyday life. In addition, spiritual science must use words that are coined for ordinary, everyday life. This presents many difficulties, since spiritual science sometimes has to use the same words in a different sense. It must tie in with familiar phenomena of life in order to be able to shed light on the spiritual realm. From the standpoint of consciousness, not from the standpoint of natural science — which is not the subject of our consideration today — human beings are familiar with the alternating states of sleeping and waking. On the one hand, there is the time when human consciousness is present, from waking up to falling asleep, and on the other hand as the time when consciousness is plunged into darkness, into the consciousness of sleep. The spiritual researcher knows that it is so weak that one usually speaks of the absence of consciousness in sleep. Now, these two alternating states of the human being, which are truly equally necessary for life, are suitable for introducing us a little way into the mystery of the human being through a realistic observation. From the outset, it should be obvious to everyone that the actual human being cannot possibly begin anew with falling asleep and waking up. That which is the soul-spiritual being in man, which otherwise lives as consciousness in the waking state, must also be present in sleep. But for ordinary consciousness, the situation is such that man cannot observe himself in sleep through his own self-observation, and therefore cannot compare the waking state with the sleeping state inwardly and spiritually. Externally, scientifically, this is a different matter. Now it is a question of coming closer to these things by really ascending from ordinary sensory observation to spiritual observation in the manner described, so that one grasps the life of imagination, feeling, and will with the inner spiritual eye.

Let us first turn our attention to the life of imagination. People generally view it in such a way that they know: I am awake from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep. My thoughts, arising from perceptions or also arising internally, enter into my ordinary waking life. Ordinary consciousness cannot come to any other conclusion. It is different when the human soul life is prepared for spiritual observation through such exercises. Then one is able to observe this whole inner world of expansion, the waking consciousness itself, from waking up to falling asleep. It is remarkable how here, as in so many other areas, serious natural scientists today encounter what spiritual science brings to light from a completely different perspective. But natural science can only build a bridge to the life of the soul on the basis of physical examination. It still refuses to talk about what is being discussed here. That is why natural scientists today, when they talk about these things, use a completely different language than spiritual scientists. But things will come together, as surely as the drilling through a mountain undertaken according to correct geological and geometric methods for the construction of a tunnel comes together in the middle. For example, interesting studies have recently appeared in the field of natural science by the researcher Julius Pikler, who views human waking consciousness in a completely different way than has been customary in biology up to now. Of course, he does not think to examine this from a spiritual scientific perspective. He therefore bases his work on something that is little more than a word. Pikler speaks of a waking instinct that simply keeps humans awake from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep, that is present even when there are no particular thoughts or ideas, and that is said to manifest itself particularly in boredom. I just wanted to point this out to show how boring it can be from the other side as well.

Spiritual science cannot simply take any word or any hypothetically assumed force as a basis where a phenomenon occurs, but must observe. It observes what the human soul experiences when it is in the waking state that everyone can experience. It observes the steady flow of conscious daily life from waking up to falling asleep. What does spiritual science find? It finds its way in particular when it uses its methods of observation to observe the intrusion of thoughts and ideas into this simple waking state. What does the spiritual researcher observe when he follows the calm stream of waking life and then the intrusion of ideas? The spiritual researcher finds that the ordinary bright waking state, which otherwise flows like a calm stream, is interrupted by a partial falling asleep in the grasping of thoughts, in the experiencing of thoughts. We wake up in such a way that we continually dampen the waking state to a partial sleep by bringing ideas into the waking state. We only learn about the soul's behavior in relation to the life of ideas by observing how the otherwise intense waking state is not dampened as strongly as in dreamless sleep, but is nevertheless dampened, and how every time this dampening occurs, thoughts that can be evoked by a perception fall into it. So we do not experience the normal waking state with a uniform intensity, but it is constantly dampened and dimmed as we form thoughts. Thus, what is otherwise present in sleep in a stronger or complete state of dullness continues into waking life in the form of imagination and thought life. This leads us to differentiate what we otherwise experience as a colorful succession of images in the waking state. What we otherwise know as waking and sleeping with a uniform degree of intensity must be learned to imagine with other degrees of intensity. We must be able to observe complete wakefulness, diminished wakefulness, complete sleep, diminished sleep, and so on.

In this way, one gradually learns to really pay attention to what is otherwise not noticed at all in conscious life. By penetrating into ordinary soul life in this way, one now also becomes able to contemplate the waking state itself through observation, for which the spiritual eye must first be created, just as the physical eye is created for the sensory world. Then one does not need proof for what one sees, but simply looks at it. One comes to regard a view as the correct one, as the immediate one, given by experience, which is spoken of extremely rarely in previous soul teaching, but once very beautifully, namely by the much too little noticed soul researcher Fortlage. Here we come to one of those points that are so interesting for the development of what today wants to appear as spiritual research. This is not something completely new, but something that only needs to be built up in a systematic summary, for which, however, the beginnings have already become apparent in those who have struggled with knowledge in this field here and there. Fortlage once speaks of this, and Eduard von Hartmann reproaches him for saying that the ordinary consciousness of the human soul is actually a continuous, weakened dying. It is a strange, bold assertion, but one that can be corroborated by natural science, even though natural science misinterprets the relevant facts; read, for example, the investigations of Kassowitz. Fortlage comes to realize that what gives rise to consciousness is not based solely on the emergence of growing, sprouting, thriving life, but that precisely when conscious life appears in the soul, the sprouting, growing, thriving life in the human organism must die, so that we carry death within us in our entire life, insofar as it is a conscious one. When we form ideas, something in our nervous system is destroyed, but it is immediately reformed again. Decay is followed by reconstruction. Conscious soul life is based on processes of decay, not on sprouting, sprouting processes of construction. Fortlage says it very nicely: If what always occurs in one part of the body, in the brain, when consciousness is formed, the partial dying, were to affect the whole body each time, as physical death does, then human beings would have to die continuously. For Fortlage, physical death expresses only once what consciousness is constantly based on. Therefore, Fortlage can conclude, albeit only hypothetically because he does not yet have spiritual insight, that if we are dealing with partial death every time our ordinary consciousness arises, then general death is the merging of consciousness under other conditions, which man then develops for the spiritual world when he has passed through the gate of death.

This shows, like a ray of light, what spiritual science will develop more and more precisely by applying its methods of observation to the human being. Science shows that the whole being of the human being, which is rightly placed today under the idea of development from one side, must not be placed under the idea of development alone. I will not extend this consideration beyond the human being at this point; we will talk in detail about nature later, where such questions can be addressed. If we remain with the human being, this human being must be viewed in such a way that we know that there is a development of sprouting, budding, growing life, but also a continuous process of decay, of regressive development. The organs of this process of decay, the organs in which not a progressive but a regressive development takes place, are primarily the nervous system in the human body. The soul consciousness intervenes in the human being by allowing the growing, sprouting processes to alternate with processes that represent a regressive development. The entire waking life, from waking up to falling asleep, is based on the fact that upon waking up, the soul-spiritual, which separated from the body upon falling asleep, submerges into the body, and what is progressive development from falling asleep to waking up is transformed into regressive development in relation to the nervous system. By thinking, by imagining, human beings must break down, must bring about death processes in their nerves in order to make room for the activity of the spiritual-soul. Natural science will increasingly testify to this from the other side. The spiritual researcher moves from the spiritual-soul to the physical and shows that, as the spiritual-soul flows into the physical upon awakening, it is broken down until the breakdown has progressed so far that the progressive development must occur again with the onset of sleep. The steadily progressing waking state is based on the fact that, through the soul-spiritual in the human body, a regular, lawful process of breakdown, a regression, takes place again and again, opposite to the current that lives in ordinary waking, that is active in the forces that allow us to grow and thrive as children. If we introduce imagination and thought into the ordinary waking state, we again have the opposite effect. We bring pieces of further development into the process of breakdown from the physical side, partial states of sleep, so that we can say: the state that extends beyond ordinary waking life is weakened by processes that very faintly represent what is present in growth, that is, by breakdown. Now it becomes apparent to the spiritual researcher that this breaking down, this continuously progressive process from waking up to falling asleep, is the effect of what the spiritual researcher recognizes with true self-observation as the spirit in man. Spirit breaks down, and within this breakdown, the activities of imagination and thinking come into play, in which the soul uses the building processes to place them into the spiritual breakdown processes. Here we see the spiritual-soul and the physical interacting. The spiritual researcher is not inclined to speak dilettantishly about the spiritual-soul aspect, disregarding what takes place in the body, precisely because he himself observes how the spirit does not work in such a way as to express the processes of growth and development, which are pure natural processes, but rather processes that are opposed to them. By learning what the spirit accomplishes in the body, the spiritual researcher also learns to recognize how the soul uses bodily processes to dampen spiritual processes by introducing ideas into the process of decomposition carried out by the spirit. By this I am merely hinting at how the spiritual researcher comes to see the interrelationship, the interaction of the spiritual, the soul, and the physical in the human being.

Just as he recognizes a partial falling asleep in the ideas that play into the ordinary waking state, he learns to recognize how every time a will impulse enters the soul life, it enters as a kind of elevation of the waking state, like an awakening. Imagination is like a dulling of the waking state, the impulse of will like an awakening, like a brightening of the state that is continuous from awakening to falling asleep in relation to the life of the will, which is so dull that even when one is awake, it can be described as a life of sleep. What does a person know, when they carry out some impulse of the will, about what is going on in their arm? But every time an impulse of the will arises, it is like an awakening.

I have thus indicated to you how the true observer, who has risen to true self-observation, can perceive the working of the human soul forces and spirit forces in the spiritual realm. By advancing with his methods, he can get to know the self that he experiences within himself in this self-observation, with which he carries out the self-observation, just as one gets to know the ordinary, everyday self. This self cannot be recognized through philosophical speculation; it can only be experienced. When it is experienced, one learns through direct observation what I have now sketched out in outline. The person with ordinary consciousness cannot help but believe, when he or she considers only the growing, sprouting, budding forces of development, that as the child grows out of the dull state of consciousness and gradually begins to say “I,” to become self-conscious at all, what is expressed in the soul as the “I” gradually develops out of the developmental processes of the body. saying “I,” gradually coming to self-consciousness, what is expressed in the soul as the “I” gradually develops from the developmental processes of the body. For those who come to know the I through true self-observation, it becomes clear that this is erroneous — but it is a necessary error for ordinary consciousness — just as it would be erroneous to believe that because a person has air in their lungs, the air they exhale rises out of their lungs. Here, one can already learn through external, actual observation that it would be nonsense to regard the air connected with the human lungs as something that springs from the human lungs. If one wants to recognize the air, one must go out of the lungs; if one wants to recognize the air in its own essence, one must move to the external airspace. One does the same thing when one has ascended to self-observation in the manner characterized here. There one learns to recognize that what takes place in the body in the continuous sprouting, budding processes of development relates to the human ego, to the true self, in the same way as the lungs relate to the air. Just as the lungs are not creators of air, so the human body is not in any way a creator of the I. Only as long as one does not know the real spiritual-soul nature does one come to the necessary error of thinking that this I has something to do with the body. But through his methods of researching the I, the spiritual researcher goes out of the body, just as someone who wants to observe the air for himself goes out of the lungs. In this way, the spiritual researcher comes to recognize through real observation how this self, this spiritual-soul aspect of the human being — if I may use a figurative expression — enters the physical body at birth or conception, which it receives through the stream of heredity, just as this I, which descends from the spiritual world, maintains the body, just as the lungs maintain the air. or conception, which it receives through the stream of heredity, how this I, which descends from the spiritual world, receives the body, just as the lungs are added to the air, so that the body inhales this I, and when the human being passes through the gate of death, exhales it again. This is a pictorial expression for the connection between the spiritual-soul, which descends from the spiritual world, and the physical-bodily. Just as, when one gets to know the essence of air, one does not seek this essence in the external airspace, but in the lungs, so too, once one has truly gotten to know the I, one does not seek the essence of the spiritual-soul I in the external physical body.

But it is precisely then that the spiritual researcher makes an essential distinction between the spiritual and the soul, even in the transition from the human being to the soul-spiritual environment in which the human being lives with that part of his being that goes through birth and death, which is the eternal, immortal in the human being in contrast to the transience of the body. This difference between the soul and the spirit arises from the fact that in the soul, which detaches itself from the human being and is not directly connected to the human being, we learn to recognize something that is, in a sense, only a faded keynote of what we otherwise experience in the life of the soul as thinking, feeling, and willing. I would like to express myself as follows: Let us take a sung song. We can consider the words, we can consider the song first as poetry, and we can continue this consideration while listening to the sung song. But we can also disregard the content of the words, the sentences, while singing, and pay attention to the mere sound, to the mere melody, to that which comes to light when we disregard the content of the words. It is only a comparison that I need, but the comparison has real significance in relation to what I am saying here. The whole experience of the human being in imagining, feeling, and willing can be grasped in such a way that one can also perceive an undertone if one does not go into the content of imagining, feeling, and willing as they appear in ordinary consciousness.

To express myself even more clearly, I would like to characterize the matter from another angle. You are all aware that certain Oriental peoples ascend to the spiritual-soul realm through methods which, as I have repeatedly stated in the lectures I have given here and also in my books, are not applicable in the same way to our Western cultural development, but that other methods must be used here for conscious spiritual research. However, some comparisons can be made. You know that Easterners attain a certain knowledge of the soul — which they may not admit, but that is not important now — by repeating mantras over and over again. In the West, people laugh at the repetitions in the Buddha's speeches, not realizing that for Easterners, this repetition of certain phrases is a necessity because it allows them to achieve a certain undertone in their inner reception of the material, disregarding its immediate content. I would say that, in a sense, a music that lives in these sayings is heard or spoken in the soul. The soul transports itself into something like this. In my books you can find how we do this in a more spiritual and soulful way in Western spiritual development, so that we do not fall into such chanting or reciting of mantric sayings or repetitions. But what is achieved in a different way can be explained by drawing attention to how something is experienced in imagining, feeling, and willing, which is a fundamental or underlying tone.

If one sets out to achieve full self-observation while maintaining the content of imagination, feeling, and will as one has it in ordinary waking consciousness, one usually discovers the workings of the spirit most easily. The soul, on the other hand, is more intimate and often elusive. One must undertake difficult and lengthy exercises if one wants to arrive at this. While it is relatively easier to discover how the mind deteriorates in the flowing waking state, one must use more subtle, more intimate exercises to observe how the ideas that arise are partial states of sleep. But when one arrives at this more intimate experience of the soul through methods such as those I have described in my books, one also moves beyond the merely subjective life of the soul into the objective life of the soul. One then pursues not only the spiritual-soul life as such, as one pursues the air from the lungs into the airspace, into that spiritual space which the human being experiences between death and a new birth, in a purely spiritual experience, but one can then pursue the soul life in its state before birth and in its state after death. As strange as this may sound to people today, these things can be experienced. And on the basis of this experience, which Easterners develop in a way that is so close to their intimate soul life, they realized earlier than Westerners how the entire human soul life unfolds in repeated earthly lives, how repeated earthly lives really result from observation. It is a result of observing soul experience. Experiencing the eternal, imperishable, which passes through births and deaths, in its spirituality is now something different from this soul experience as it occurs in repeated earthly lives. It is like a specialization, a differentiation of spiritual experience.

Just as one sees in the individual human being, in the soul's interaction with the general spiritual life, imagination playing a part as a kind of partial sleep, so one can observe in the outer world — I will go into these things in more detail in the next lecture — how the soul plays a part in that spiritual space which one discovers as the scene of the eternal spiritual in the human being, by specializing the general eternal spiritual life into repeated earthly lives, which, however, once began and will come to an end. I will speak about this in the next lecture.

This is achieved through the genuine training of the soul's abilities, which not everyone needs to acquire. But every human being has a sense of truth. If this sense of truth is not clouded by prejudices, which are all too easy to find in popular or scientific worldviews today, then one will be able to agree with what the spiritual researcher has to say, even before one has become a spiritual researcher oneself. For the seer differs from other people — I have already expressed this here as a parable — like the one who watches the watchmaker from the one who only sees the watch. The one who sees the watch knows that it was created through the intellectual activity of the watchmaker; one does not need to have watched the watchmaker to know this. When the spiritual researcher describes, through seerish observation based on his research, how everyday life comes about, those who observe this directly will find confirmation of what has been said everywhere, even if they are not spiritual researchers themselves. Even if it still seems paradoxical today in the general development of intellectual culture how the spiritual researcher has to think about the body, soul, and spirit of the human being, in the course of time, as natural science works against what spiritual research has to say, spiritual research will also achieve what natural science has slowly and gradually achieved. Just consider that there was a time when certain prejudices prevented the emergence of physiology and biology in the modern sense. Today, there is a prejudice against building a bridge between the human soul and what goes on in the human body as the soul flows through it. The study of anatomy only emerged during the Middle Ages. Before that, there was a prejudice against adding what goes on in the body to what the soul can experience within. Spiritual science is in the same position today. And even if one does not believe it, today's prejudices are of the same value and stem from the same causes. Just as in the Middle Ages people did not want to allow the body to be dissected in order to recognize what takes place in the body as a condition for spiritual life, so even today the most serious scientists are still reluctant to investigate the spirit using spiritual scientific methods. And just as the Middle Ages only gradually came to allow the study of the human body to be opened up to science, so too will the cultural development of humanity make it necessary for the study of the spirit, which is not the same as the soul, to be opened up to spiritual science.

Whether one approaches people who think in a natural scientific way, or other researchers of the soul, and presents them with the results of spiritual science, one experiences the same thing, only in a different field, as told in Galileo's biography. Until Galileo's time, the old prejudice that the nerves originate in the heart, which had been perpetuated throughout the Middle Ages by a misunderstanding of Aristotle, still prevailed over physical phenomena. Galileo had told a friend that this was a prejudice. The friend was a staunch believer in Aristotle. He said that what Aristotle wrote was true, and Aristotle wrote that the nerves originate in the heart. Galileo then showed the friend a corpse and explained how visual observation taught us that the nerves originate in the brain, not the heart, and that Aristotle had not noticed this because he had not yet been able to make such observations on a corpse. The Aristotle believer remained skeptical nonetheless. Although he saw that the nerves originate in the brain, he said that the evidence speaks in your favor, but Aristotle says otherwise, and if there is a contradiction between Aristotle and nature, I believe Aristotle rather than nature. This really happened. And so it is still today. Go today to those who want to establish soul research in the old sense from a philosophical point of view, go to those who want to establish soul research in a natural scientific way, and they will claim that what originates from the spirit or body and underlies mental phenomena can only be explained somehow from the mental; and no matter how much one points to the facts of spiritual observation — which is not as easy to carry out as our scientific observation, and spiritual anatomy will be more difficult to pursue than physical anatomy — one will be answered today from the same spirit: If there is a contradiction between what Wundt or Paulsen or any other authority says and what spiritual science shows through spiritual observation, we do not believe spiritual observation, but rather what is written in the books to which we are accustomed in this age of no authority. For today, people no longer believe in authorities, but—though they do not realize it—in what is somehow officially stamped. Spiritual science will prevail, just as natural science has prevailed with regard to physical research.

Natural scientists such as Du Bois-Reymond and others speak of science having to stop where the supernatural begins. I have already pointed out the error that is apparent here in an earlier lecture. How did it arise? People have sensed—and Du Bois-Reymond senses it quite clearly—that the human being is rooted in something spiritual. But this spiritual element must first be recognized, through the development of spiritual scientific methods, as the soil from which the human soul springs. If I have a tree in front of me and see how its roots reach into the ground, I may be indignant that it hides its roots from my view, and I want to have a clear view of the tree. Today's science wants to make things clear by focusing on what is sensually visible, because the roots in the spiritual soil elude it. Science acts like someone who, in order to have a clear, vivid view of a tree, pulls it out of the ground or digs it up. They then have a clear view of it, but the tree withers. In this way, modern science, which does not want to engage with the spirit, has uprooted the tree of knowledge. But just as the tree torn from its roots, even though it can be clearly seen, withers away, so too does knowledge wither away when it is torn from its spiritual soil. A statement such as that of Du Bois-Reymond, that science ends where the supersensible begins, will in the future be transformed into the opposite conviction. People will recognize that if one does not want to acknowledge the supersensible even in natural phenomena, one uproots the tree of knowledge from its soil and causes knowledge to wither. In the future, people will not say that science ends where the supersensible begins, but if they want to base science on removing it from the soil of the supersensible, they will learn that where the supersensible ends in human spiritual life, science cannot flourish, that no real science will arise outside the supersensible, but that where the supersensible ends, there will only be a dead science.