The Eternal in the Human Soul

GA 67 — 18 April 1918, Berlin

9. The Supernatural Human Being II

The supernatural human being according to the findings of spiritual scientific research

Since the supersensible human being, insofar as he is acknowledged as such, must be recognized as the deepest inner essence of the human being, it is quite natural that the knowledge of the supersensible human being is, in the highest sense of the word, human self-knowledge. But with this human self-knowledge, one is faced with a very strange paradox. On the one hand, there is the necessity of grasping the human being itself as supersensible; on the other hand, all the cognitive abilities that the human being develops in ordinary consciousness are entirely bound to external sensuality. Even what the human being grasps with the intellect is, insofar as it belongs to human consciousness, bound to external sensuality. One could therefore say that human self-knowledge requires the perception of human beings with cognitive abilities that are initially completely foreign to their consciousness. Insofar as human beings become aware of their essence as supersensible, they must in a certain sense recognize that everything they accomplish in life springs from their supersensible nature. On the other hand, one could say that everything that occurs in his consciousness manifests itself in a somewhat inauthentic sense in the “veiling” of the sensual. This is why, precisely in the spiritual-scientific sense meant here, all research and also all talk about the supersensible is so easily and so frequently misunderstood. For today's considerations will show that with the ordinary faculties of everyday human consciousness, including the consciousness that underlies external science, one cannot approach the deepest and thus the true essence of the human being. Indeed, one must go even further: the kind of knowledge that has developed so magnificently in recent times on the basis of a scientific view of the world is, in certain areas, more likely to mislead us with regard to what human self-knowledge is than to guide this self-knowledge in the right direction. For it is precisely when the well-trained scientific mindset of the present day approaches human self-knowledge in the broadest sense that one becomes aware of how easily it can fail. Let us start with an example.

In the very interesting little book “Das unterbewusste Ich” (The Subconscious Self) by Louis Waldstein, which appeared in the Wiesbaden collection of writings on borderline questions of mental and nervous life, there is mention of many things that also strike the natural scientist when he becomes acquainted with human life in the broader sense, in its development and its manifestation in various circumstances. In an earlier lecture, we spoke of the revelations of the unconscious, the subconscious. The example I would like to cite is that of a natural scientist, and the way he talks about it is very much in the scientific sense. At a certain point, the author of this little book wants to draw attention to how these revelations of the unconscious or subconscious self approach human consciousness, how this subconscious being plays a peculiar, vague role in the conscious being of the human being. Waldstein chooses the following example to illustrate this. He says: I am standing in front of the window of a bookstore where many books are on display. Since I am a naturalist, my gaze falls on a book about mollusks. At that moment, when my gaze falls on this book, I begin to smile quietly, and I am surprised at myself for doing so, since a book about mollusks has nothing humorous about it. He continues: "I now close my eyes to explore what might be going on around me. And as I look away from the book on mollusks that interests me, I hear, very faintly, the sounds of a barrel organ in the distance. It is playing the melody of a song that was played to me in my boyhood to set the tempo when I danced my first quadrille. At the time, I didn't pay much attention to what I felt of sympathy or antipathy toward this melody, because I was very busy trying to get my dance steps right, keeping my partner moving, turning her around, and so on. So at that time, I wasn't particularly attentive to what had half entered my consciousness musically. And yet, now that I am standing in front of the mollusk beech tree, decades later, I find myself smiling quietly, which proves that the impression that melody made on me back then still has an effect now that it is being played again by a barrel organ; and if I hadn't closed my eyes, but had simply been content with my astonishment at having to smile in front of a mollusk book, I wouldn't have known in the present how I came to be smiling in front of the mollusk book.

This shows how mysteriously such things continue to have an effect in the depths of the human soul, how much there is in and about human beings that only comes to consciousness in a dreamlike, one might say, blurred way; it shows how difficult it is to achieve true self-knowledge of the human being. For what danger does one actually expose oneself to when one wants to practice self-observation? The danger of having to deal with all kinds of subconscious things that one may have absorbed very vaguely decades ago, which continue to have an effect, which only act like a mood in the deepest depths of the soul, which then rise up and color and nuance what one now observes in oneself. Waldstein and others provide numerous examples of this. You will also find such examples in my book How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds. Such examples are very suitable for making one quite cautious with regard to what is called human self-observation. For many people take up self-observation and believe that in this way they will also attain a real knowledge of the human being itself. Some also believe that by bringing up such memories from their subconscious, they can make all kinds of clairvoyant discoveries.

Now, one can also be cautious in another way. One can, for example, realize that some who claim to see through this or that through their extrasensory knowledge of their inner being express these extrasensory insights in images taken from, for example, telegraphs, railroads, or the like. From this, one would see that the supernatural, with its images, had to wait until the railroads were invented in order to reveal itself. But anyone who does not approach supernatural research lightly and uncritically will also easily be able to see how carelessly, frivolously, and uncritically people sometimes proceed in this field, and how beneficial it actually is that thorough scientific thinking points out how such content, which some people sometimes consider to be revelations from higher worlds, are nothing more than what the person concerned once absorbed in some vague way in an earlier age, which did not come to consciousness at that time, which has changed in many ways, which he does not recognize again, but which he now considers to be a revelation that came about in a supersensible way. In my aforementioned book, I pointed out how everything actually affects human beings and how sometimes what people consider to be an inspiration is nothing more than the transformation of a shop sign that they did not look at properly as they passed by on the street, but which only penetrated their subconscious.

This points to an area of human life that must be considered very carefully and critically, especially by those who seriously want to extend their research to the supernatural world. But on the other hand, this whole business of reminiscence, this whole life of subconscious images that arise and mimic human beings, points to something quite different. it is, so to speak, the side effect of something completely different. Here I must return in more detail to something I have already mentioned in the course of these lectures: the relationship between what we call the memory of the human soul and what we call ordinary imagination. A very common way of thinking, which has also played a major role in science, particularly in psychology, is that human beings have experiences when they encounter the outside world. These experiences evoke ideas in them. They now have these ideas. After some time, they “remember.” Now, this process is very often imagined as if these ideas, which one once had and which were wandering somewhere in the depths of the soul, then, when they are remembered, wander back up into consciousness. We often think, more or less consciously or subconsciously, that what reappears in our memory is nothing other than the same idea we once had, which was wandering around down there or sleeping or something else, and then comes back up into our consciousness. But anyone who knows how to observe this area properly will have to regard this way of thinking as rather childish and amateurish. For when we are confronted with an external phenomenon, when we have an experience of the smallest or greatest kind that evokes perceptions in us and, through these perceptions, ideas, this “activity” — I will call it that for the time being — which flows in the interaction between us and the outside world is accompanied by another activity that usually does not enter human consciousness at all. This activity is quite different; it accompanies the conscious image-forming “activity” and accomplishes something in our human being that then leads to the formation of memory. However, in order to understand what I mean, one must be able to observe correctly. The most trivial observation in this area is when you consider the difference between forming ideas, which can be very easy, and memorizing. Just think of all the things young people who have to “cram” for an exam or something similar have to do so that they not only have something in their imagination, but can also remember it. Sometimes very strange things are done on the side. Think of the game that takes place between the human hands and the head when someone has to cram. Of course, this is only an outward sign of what I mean. But in reality, while the activity that leads to imagination is taking place, there is another activity that does not enter our consciousness and that has an effect on our organism that is completely different from the formation of ideas. Later, when we remember what we once imagined, this image arises anew; it arises, so to speak, from the “sign,” from the ‘engram’ — if I may use this expression — from the “inscription” that this activity accompanying the formation of images can exert on our organism. Just as we face the object of the external world and, turning inward, form our idea, so in remembering we face our own organism. What takes place there, which is as different from our imagining as the external object is from our idea, is now translated back into the idea.

Anyone who understands how to observe the organization of the human mind and its effectiveness knows that what forms as an idea comes and goes as it is imagined. And when something is remembered, it is not the idea that has been dormant and reemerges, but rather the idea is newly formed from something completely different that is going on deep within the organism. What I want to point out here is that in the activity I have just described as accompanying, we have something to see that actually runs parallel to our entire conscious life, is underground in our conscious life, and is connected with something that always emerges with the memory images from our subconscious. Just as, I would say, everything that appears in the vastness of the world also has its accompanying phenomena, which sometimes appear like caricatures of the real thing, so too is what was cited earlier as an example from Louis Waldstein's writing such an accompanying phenomenon of the quite normal, regular kind, as the human being works in the memory function. One might say: what goes on subconsciously, so that human beings are beings with memory, comes to the fore when it overflows or remains somewhat indistinct, blurred, in such things as the fact that, depending on one's mood, one can hardly hear the sounds of a barrel organ and yet they still have an effect that can make one smile in front of a mollusk beech tree. What is present here veils what is important rather than explaining things. For what is important is a very normal activity that is very necessary for human beings, namely that which underlies human memory. This is something that accompanies our entire conscious life, but in ordinary life we do not pay attention to this accompanying factor. This accompanying activity lies in the structure of our organization.

It is now a kind of touchstone for real supersensible research to look at something like this memory-forming, accompanying activity of our imaginative life. For what weaves and lives as continuously as a normal activity in the subconscious can be transformed into consciousness, at least at a first stage. And this transformation of the unconscious into the conscious is one of the links that leads to real spiritual research, to real exploration of the supersensible. In order to truly explore the supersensible, what otherwise remains subconscious must be brought into consciousness. This already makes it something different. Now, what is described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” as exercises that must be performed in order to bring the soul into a state in which it is able to face the supersensible consists of many things. But one can also illustrate something elementary by showing how closely this first elementary thing is related to a completely normal human activity that otherwise remains subconscious. One need only consciously perform the activity that is carried out unconsciously but quite normally in order to form memory. To do this, it is necessary to be able to disregard what is otherwise conscious, that is, to be able to disregard, not for life, but in order to research the spiritual, the activity that evokes the ordinary, sensual imagination. One must, in a sense, be able to withdraw from this imagination. But this cannot be done unless one can replace it with another imagination in the soul, unless one can strengthen and fortify the soul internally so that something other than what is sustained by external perception arises in the soul. This is achieved by placing self-willed, self-formed ideas that are comprehensible at the center of one's soul life, that is, by withdrawing from external observation, being with oneself, and bringing self-formed, comprehensible ideas into one's soul life.

I say “manageable” ideas; this is extremely important. They must be self-willed, self-formed, manageable ideas for the simple reason that everything subconscious, everything that one cannot know where it comes from, from what blurred perception, whether it is somehow the sounds of a barrel organ, must be eliminated. However, as this example shows, one can never be sure that this blurred, subconscious weaving of the soul's life will be eliminated unless one introduces into this soul life an idea that one can truly see through at the moment when one has formed it, wanted it oneself, put it together oneself, so that one knows: Every part of this idea has come from the immediate will that you have unfolded at this moment. “Willingly chosen” does not mean “self-made,” of course; you can have such ideas given to you by an experienced spiritual researcher, and he will even know best how they can be adapted to the individuality of the person concerned. But what matters is that one brings them into the soul, that one lets the thoughts flow through the image and experiences it in the soul, that one has nothing else in the soul but this image. And it is also important that these ideas engage our consciousness in a very flexible way, that they are present in every atom, so to speak, of our imagination, that they are present throughout the entire overview of this imagination. This is particularly fulfilled when we take into our consciousness ideas that stimulate us to make the thoughts we apply to them flexible.

A growing plant, for example, which becomes larger and larger, is a good idea; not staring at something that is at rest, but at something that is in motion or that has some kind of relationship to each other. This protects us from our consciousness becoming inactive by staring at the idea. For in researching the supersensible world, it is important that everything done in preparation for this research be fully illuminated and permeated by consciousness from beginning to end, that consciousness not be dampened in any way. Therefore, one of the first requirements of the preparatory spiritual researcher is that he excludes from the activity of his soul that is intended to lead to spiritual research — not, of course, from the rest of his life — everything that could in any way lead to a dulling of consciousness. It is especially important that in this life, in clear ideas — in this “meditation,” as one might call it, to have an expression for it; but it is more important to look at the matter than to find an expression for it — nothing reigns in consciousness that can lower it. Thus, the first requirement is that everything dreamlike that dawns from the indeterminate, unconscious life of the soul, all thoughts that arise from within, to which one gladly indulges in a certain spiritual voluptuousness, be thoroughly eliminated from the preparations for spiritual scientific research. Furthermore, everything that could in any way lower consciousness in perception must be removed. Therefore, even inwardly, in the soul, what is being strived for must not have anything to do, for example, with staring at a shining point, through which one could enter a certain hypnotic state, or with what some people consider to be a rather nice preparation for spiritual contemplation — because they do not need to be pretty while doing it — such as such as “crystal gazing” and the like. The opposite of everything that has anything to do with lowering consciousness, with suggestive or hypnotic states, must be developed when it comes to preparation for spiritual research. Neither the dreamlike nor the staring should in any way enter into the preparations for spiritual research. You can see from this that when you hear people who are also “followers” of spiritual science characterize it in such a way that one must lose oneself in a dreamlike “devotion,” losing touch with one's own being, reveling in one's consciousness, lost to humanity and the world, then this is the kind of “spiritual science” that can perhaps cause a great deal of comfort, even a great deal of pleasant reverie, but which certainly does not lead to the exploration of the supersensible world.

Sometimes attention must be drawn to such things, for even people who want to be serious critics of spiritual research, as it is meant here, confuse it with its opposite. Even a critic who has caused quite a stir thoroughly confuses this spiritual research with its opposite, and he describes the “beyond of the soul” precisely in those phenomena which, according to the methods of spiritual research, are anything but what lives in the realm of the spiritual world. It is strange, however, that this very critic has stated—he cites it as an example of his own soul life, which is sometimes interesting—that when he gives a lecture, he continues speaking for a while and only then realizes that he has continued speaking without his thoughts keeping up. Of a speaker who can do this, who can speak to his audience in such a way that the words flow without his thoughts accompanying them, one can be quite sure that he has not understood a trace of what is meant here by spiritual research.

Of course, what I have now stated needs to be developed further, but what is important to me now is to emphasize the essential points. The essential and important thing about what one experiences inwardly in this way is this: by evoking such ideas more and more in the soul and paying attention to how the soul then acts, how it acts differently than in external perception, at a certain point the great and significant fact is revealed that one is now in the midst of what such meditation has brought about in oneself, that one is in the midst of such inner soul activity, which otherwise remains unconscious and, as unconscious, leads to the formation of memory in ordinary life. In a sense, one has shifted what one otherwise experiences in one's imaginative life down a level. One has not taken into account what one otherwise experiences in one's imaginative life, and one has taken into account what otherwise accompanies this formation of images. One has shifted one's entire ego consciousness down a level, where what leads to memory is otherwise accomplished, and in this way one learns to recognize what otherwise constantly plays out in the soul, what one does not take into account in ordinary consciousness, but which weaves and lives and enables one to have memories. And I have often shown here what depends on the fact that human beings can form memories. Everyone knows what it means for a person when their memory is disturbed in a pathological way for a time. One learns to recognize a level of soul experience that is subconscious in ordinary life, yet cannot be denied because its effects are there. However, when one immerses oneself in what one has awakened through meditation, it is a special experience. And for those who are sensitive to such things, this experience is a profound one. One experiences that now, having reached this level of soul life that lies beneath consciousness, one has reached the level where memory lives and weaves, that one has approached something in one's own human being that otherwise remains quite unconscious, that usually never even comes close to entering consciousness in its true nature. For with regard to this memory-forming power, which one has now learned to understand a little in its essence, one learns to recognize a certain kinship with what in us is the power of growth and decline, with all that leads us from childhood to adulthood out of our organic life, and what makes our life “outgrow” itself as we decline from a certain stage onwards. We learn to recognize everything that lives and weaves within us as organ-forming forces that enlarge us and continue to be effective in us later on, what organic power is, what formative power is within us, but also what formative power is in plants. For while what weaves and lives below and expresses itself in our growth is quite distant from our ordinary imagination, we find it close to what now appears as the memory-forming force. Something that is otherwise within us always grows together: two currents, the power of growth, the formative power within ourselves, and the power of memory, grow together into a composite structure that we have within us and that we learn to know in this way. We carry this around with us constantly.

Ordinary consciousness has no inkling that the same force that accompanies human beings from childhood as a force of growth, as a formative force, is, in an intensified and refined form, the same force that is called upon when human beings form memories. But it is something composite. When you get to know the matter, it presents itself as something composite. For you learn to distinguish again between what is, as it were, bound together as the power of growth and the power of memory; it is, in a sense, a duality that works together as a unity. As you delve into the matter, you discover that what you bring up as memory is actually subconscious knowledge, a deeper level of consciousness, a life and weaving of consciousness in which our ordinary ego does not live. But this consciousness permeates the other within us, which is the power of growth. These two — the power of growth and creation and the power of memory — can be recognized as something that stands opposite each other, only closer to each other than our conscious knowledge and the outer physical world. Only our conscious knowledge is further away from the outer physical world; we cannot bridge the gap between the one and the other, we cannot cross over for ordinary consciousness. What we want to bring up, what we become aware of through meditation, carries its own object within it, so to speak, but is still something related to our knowledge. We learn to see through a duality. However, the further we go in our soul life, the more clearly this duality appears before our observing consciousness. In this way, we see what weaves and lives as a force of growth. We see it — to use a good old Troxlerian saying — as true human physicality as opposed to physical corporeality. In our ordinary consciousness, we perceive physical corporeality. This subconsciousness, which we have now reached, perceives this physicality within us.

In order not to be misunderstood, I have recently referred to what lives and weaves within us as a creative force, which is not perceived by ordinary consciousness but by that which works and weaves in memory, as the “image-forming body” in the magazine “Das Reich.” I used to call it the “etheric body,” but since certain people take offense at expressions, I have tried to come closer to what it is with words and have called that which is closest to our physical body and accompanies our whole life as the formative power the “image-forming body.” And that which does not live in our ordinary consciousness, which is always close to this formative body beneath this consciousness, and which can be reached through meditation, can be called — if one is not afraid that the mockers will come and make fun of what they do not understand — the “astral body” for well-known reasons; but it can also be called the “soul,” which works one layer deeper than ordinary consciousness. And just as the chemist breaks down a composite substance into its various elements, or just as the physicist divides what meets him in white sunlight into different shades of color, so we have now divided the human being into the physical body, which can be seen with the outer senses and is subject to outer perception, the formative body, which is the first supersensible part of the human being, and the astral body or soul being, which does not know about the life and weaving of the formative body in the manner of ordinary consciousness, but knows about it beneath ordinary consciousness, and only shines up into ordinary consciousness in the images of memory, in the waves that form as memories. And then, in a sense, separated from all this is that which floats on this threefold human being: the actual I-being, the being that knows nothing of what the soul knows in the sense meant here about the physical, but which separates itself from the soul and then forms ordinary consciousness, and which is spiritual. That this I-being, which at first does not perceive the spiritual, but uses the instruments of the senses to perceive the environment and to perceive the human being itself with the means that are also applicable to the environment, — that this I, this actual self of the human being, must again be separated as a special member from the other members of the human being, this only becomes apparent when one advances a little further in the soul exercises that I have indicated in principle. I have described how one can bring self-formed, manageable ideas into the soul. It is good, I said, to take ideas that require the life of imagination itself to be flexible, and then to try to feel and experience what can be experienced in this resting in such ideas.

There are two things here. One is that one becomes aware that there is a kind of weaving and living in the human being that is similar to the formation of memory. The other is what one experiences when one looks particularly inwardly at this experience. It is just as if, for example, one were to proceed in such a way that, on the one hand, one forms ideas and, on the other hand, one forms thoughts, which then become memories. This is a special experience. Those who go through this, who train themselves to become spiritual researchers in the true sense, know that this is a special experience. For from a certain moment on, an element ceases to prevail in this soul life, which otherwise always has a meaning for our soul life: the spatial element ceases. If you reflect on how everything you imagine in ordinary consciousness is saturated and permeated by some kind of spatial conceptions — for in ordinary consciousness one can hardly imagine anything that is not imagined together with space — then you will realize how much ordinary consciousness is attached to space. This experience, which is linked to such ideas as I have developed, gradually leads to a sense of being lifted out of space and knowing oneself to be in purely temporal processes, in temporal processes within it. This is like a significant advance in human soul life: knowing oneself to be in the stream of time, for this leads to truly seeing through the stream of time. I said that the whole thing boils down to recognizing the relationship between memory and the forces of growth that accompany our physical development. It is precisely into this temporality that we are transported.

And something else is particularly important. I said it is twofold: these ideas have — and now pay particular attention to what you experience there, how you really experience the becoming mobile of the life of imagination, the mere weaving in time; for then you are there with your ego in this life of imagination. But you are not only in an imaginative life, but in a life that is permeated by the real forces living and weaving in time. Then you have arrived at an experience of the I that is completely different from the ordinary experience of the I. Anyone who knows the ordinary experience of the I through proper self-observation knows how closely it is bound to human physicality, and I described last time to which elements of physicality the I is primarily bound: that it is a matter of equilibrium, that is, something that is decisively placed in space. But one cannot remain with this experience; rather, one enters properly into the course of time.

What has now been indicated is still taken into account by very few people today — even by those who deal with these matters professionally — and one hears ideas characterized that are still accepted today as if they represented the most certain truths. Some philosophical thinkers assume that our ego — that is, the ego that has ordinary consciousness — is the ego that remains constant throughout all experiences from birth to death. A philosopher who, admittedly, approached his philosophy in a strange way, coined the peculiar concept that this self, into which one must intuitively place oneself in order to become a true philosopher, is particularly characterized by the quality of “duration.” Yes, he even coined the strange phrase that no one can penetrate to the essence of human nature who cannot grasp this concept: “duration lasts.” While everything external passes away, this inner life of the self, as he believes he knows it, is duration, pure duration. When he says, “duration lasts,” one has the feeling that someone is trying to characterize “wood woods” or “iron irons.” But when a philosopher coins such a phrase, today's authority-believing humanity does not think about the logic of such a thing. But apart from that, there is a very obvious refutation of this strange concept of the enduring ordinary self. Every night is an example of this, where from falling asleep to waking up — with the exception of the time when dreams weave — the experience of the self ceases. Every dreamless sleep refutes this famous tenet of Bergson's philosophy. If one wants to understand human beings, one cannot build anything on the ordinary experience of the self. Instead, one must carry the experience of the self into the flow of time. And then, when one carries the ego into the flow of time, when this new experience of the ego appears alongside the other experiences of the subconscious soul and the form-building body, then it is no longer true that every sleep interrupts this experience of the ego, but something else applies. For then it turns out that the following is also connected with our concept of the ego.

Last time, I pointed out the dull feeling from which this concept of the I actually arises. It must be kindled, so to speak. In dreamless sleep, from falling asleep to waking up, it is not there. What kindles it? It is kindled at the moment when we approach our physicality again with our soul. Our physicality is the external stimulus for what we find as our ego in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness, we collide with our body; this stimulates our sense of self. This sense of self should not be regarded as something permanent. But with what I have now described as a new experience of self, the situation is quite different. It lives in the stream of time; it is lifted out of the spatial realm. This is kindled precisely when the human being ignites the experience at a single point in time — now not in spatial collision with physicality, but in collision with the experience of another point in time. This experience of the self that I have just spoken of is identical to the fact that when I wake up, I mysteriously collide with the moment in time when I fell asleep. And this forms the basis for the new experience of the self, that we experience ourselves in different, successive moments in time, that we look across time, that we bridge time, even if it is discontinuous, when sleep disturbs it. That is the essence of this experience of the self. By immersing the self in the soul, insofar as this is related to the conditions of growth, we immerse the self itself in the conditions of growth. We penetrate into the self, which accompanies us from birth to death; we penetrate into the continuous stream of self-experience. What is otherwise only deduced from philosophy, what is only judged, is experienced. And one even resists — I have already mentioned this here — Eduard von Hartmann's statement in his psychological writings that if one wants to observe a feeling, it is disturbed and changed by doing so.

When Eduard von Hartmann remarks on this, he wants to rule out the possibility that the I can live in this stream of time. He wants to prove that the stream of time is lost to the experience of the I. But it is not lost; rather, it is gained precisely through this. Yes, anyone who can practice self-observation from this spiritual-scientific point of view knows how this experience of the ego, which is present in this moment of our existence, enters into an interrelationship with earlier moments in time.

Do not take it as silliness or showing off when I cite my own experience from my very recent days here. I want to cite my own experience, which seems very simple when it is experienced, but which recently was something that shook me inwardly. In 1894, I completed a book in which I drew attention, from a purely philosophical point of view, to how human thinking is already spiritual: my “Philosophy of Freedom.” When I wrote the book, I was a young man of thirty-three. Recently, it has become necessary to revise this book for a new edition, to go through everything that passed through my soul at that time, and at the same time to observe how my experiences now relate to the very same experiences of that time. If one manages to see how, in reliving the past experience and in this reunion with the resurrected experience, something similar occurs in time as usually happens upon awakening — an observation that passes most people by, who simply remember earlier experiences and cannot look at everything that is happening again — then one can see from such an example how the I is kindled, just as it is in physicality upon awakening, by encountering and coming up against something that was present in the stream of time. Those who cannot observe this do not appreciate what one experiences when one does not have the ego standing in the stream of space, but is forced to think of it in accordance with the ideas developed in The Philosophy of Freedom, which many people call “abstractions”; I call them the most concrete, most vivid ideas, because the Philosophy of Freedom develops nothing but living concepts. What is present is what I would call the experience of the I in relation to the interaction of one moment with another. This is where what can be figuratively called the transition to the inner musical experience of the world begins. It is, if I may compare it, as if you were to set one note of a melody in interaction with the other notes of the melody, so that not only does the note vibrate the air, so to speak, and experience itself in space, but one note interacts with another. It is actually impossible to grasp the inner weaving and life of this highest member of the human being in the inner spiritual eye other than by passing from one musical experience of one moment to another.

Thus, the entire human being is divided into 1. the physical body, 2. the formative body, which I have characterized as that which works in the memory, which spiritualizes the formative body like a subconscious knowledge, 3. the actual soul, the astral body, and 4. the I. Then, by tracing human beings from the lowest sensory limits of the physical up to what appears as the most spiritual in human beings, we have attempted to look at the actual supersensible, and only then do we have the whole, complete human being before us. But in doing so, we have also pointed to the way in which we must experience in order to be able to directly contemplate what is truly lasting in human beings. No interpretation, no philosophical dissection of the ordinary I is of any use here; this I must be carried into another sphere, must be experienced anew under completely different conditions. This ego, which is experienced in this way, is at the same time experienced as an ego independent of spatial physicality, and as it continues its exercises, it gradually rises to the point where it can perceive in the stream of time that which lives in human beings only temporally, not spatially.

If I may add something for those who know something about such things: Contemporary philosophy has pointed out that the soul cannot be approached if one wants to grasp it substantially, but only if one takes it as a passage through a process. Wundt has drawn attention to this particularly strongly. But Wundt has only pointed out abstractly that the soul cannot be approached if it is regarded as substance, but that it must be seen in the living process. But it is not a matter of merely visualizing it in the mental process through abstract concepts, but of immersing oneself in the mental process with one's own ego and experiencing this process. Then, little by little, what makes it possible to follow this soul process even beyond the times in which it is bound to the spatial-physical realm emerges. Once you have learned to let the experience of one moment in time collide with another moment in time, you can gradually develop the ability to let the inner experience of the I collide with the stream of time where the spatial-physical first arose in the stream of heredity. Then the stream of time expands beyond the spatial-physical, and one can look into the stream of time in which the ego weaves, into pre-birth life and into life after death in a certain way. Then, for a newer insight, what I have often tried to compare with a certain image arises. For those who go through what I have now described in principle, something happens inwardly that can be compared to the experience that Giordano Bruno may have had when he stood at the beginning of the newer scientific way of thinking and asserted it. Essentially, until Giordano Bruno, people looked out into space, saw the blue firmament, and considered it to be a real, physical boundary of space. It was significant that the idea first arose in Giordano Bruno's soul: there is actually nothing there; it is only our perception, only the conditions of our sensory perception, that make us see a blue shell there; in reality, it extends into infinity, and where the blue firmament appears to us is only a boundary of our perception. This also applies to the temporal. Birth or conception and death become, for the temporal firmament into which we look out, the boundary set for us by our sensory organization. What we see as our world, in which we live and weave with our ego, with our supersensible human being, lies beyond this temporal firmament, beyond death on the one hand and birth or conception on the other. And today we stand before this leap forward in human knowledge, where, in a similar way to how centuries ago the illusion of the blue vault of heaven was removed from the human imagination, the illusion that birth and death are boundaries that cannot be crossed is being removed from human perception.

This leap must be made. Then it opens up to human beings the prospect of the real life of their supersensible being. However, it must be clearly understood that anyone who wants to become a spiritual researcher in the manner described here must always be able to see, with the utmost critical self-observation, what could prevent them from objectively entering this spiritual world. It is very easy to be deterred from this. I have already described the shimmering and floating in the flow of being in the world; this must not, of course, enter into the preparation for spiritual research. But it is naturally good to use ideas that do not appeal to the life of feeling and emotion for meditation, for the practical preparations of the soul life. Anyone who uses ideas that excite them very strongly for contemplation or meditation will very easily fall into deception. Therefore, in preparation, it is particularly important to avoid bringing religious impulses into the exercises. Religious impulses that strongly excite people and have a strong effect on their emotional and interest life must be excluded. And strangely enough — although some may not agree — the very best ideas are those that leave us most calm in terms of our emotional and feeling life. If one immerses oneself in similar ideas in mathematics, especially those that introduce a dynamic life into geometry, where figures can take on different shapes, or in ideas such as those I have presented — with ideal content — in The Philosophy of Freedom, then this is something that can help us advance in this field. This is not to say that spiritual scientific research has nothing to do with religious life. But the point is that the best way to achieve the religious internalization and deepening for which spiritual science can also be a preparation is not to start from it immediately, but to set out on the path of research with ideas that are as unemotional and uninterested as possible, and then, when one is in the spiritual world, the insight that can be a powerful aid to religious deepening comes from within. For this path of the spiritual researcher, it is particularly important to focus on ideas that are not connected with the worries and concerns of life, that do not agitate the soul so much, especially ideas that are easily comprehensible. However, these are never the ideas that easily excite us, because then all kinds of things from the subconscious enter the soul. But this subconscious must be excluded above all else.

In this way, one actually penetrates into a spiritual experience where one can first find that being in the human being of which it can be said: it lives in the freedom of the will, it lives in the immortal soul being. Every human being carries it within themselves. But it can only be found cognitively in such ways as have been described.

In the next lecture, I will continue from this point to discuss the important questions of human soul life: about human free will and the immortality of the soul, in order to show how one can ascend from what can be found in the way described today as the supersensible human being to a real understanding of the life of this supersensible human being, of life in real duration, and of life in free will. There has been so much controversy about free will and the immortality of the soul because people have not wanted to make the necessary preparations to enter the field of human experience that must be entered if one wants to gain an insight into that from which free will springs and in which rests that which passes through human beings through birth and death. One must first learn to recognize how the temporal passes in human life during this earthly existence. Then one will also find the ways to transcend this earthly life. Such research can be fruitful in the most diverse fields, even if there are still many obstacles to it today. It can be fruitful for the most important, most practical areas of life, for example, for the field of education. Despite attempts to apply the most modern ideas to education today, and despite living in the “century of the child,” the field of education is not actually viewed from the perspective that is so obvious in relation to educational life: from the perspective of the temporal experience of the human soul. Anyone who, as I have described, can view one point in human experience from another, will find in the human soul a metamorphosing life, a changing life. For example, when one has grown old and looks back on earlier times and then looks back even further, and when one not only looks at it externally but experiences it internally, one notices how the inner soul structure changes, what becomes of a structure of the soul life at a particular point in time. And you notice: what in childhood acts primarily as will, what is expressed as desire, has an effect in later life, when you are older — it is still there, but it is transformed in your thought life — in the life experience that weaves itself into your thoughts. What we have as life experience at the age of fifty is the transformed will life of early childhood. Just as the petal of a flower is, in the sense of Goethe's metamorphosis, an externally transformed green leaf, but just as the leaf does not remain green but turns red in the rose, so what is desire in the child is transformed into life experiences in later life. And vice versa: what the child thinks, what is stimulated in it as a thought, is transformed into will energy in later life. So if you know this connection from your inner view of life, think how you can influence the child!

If you fulfill every nonsensical wish of the child and cause it to scatter its will in all directions, then you make it relatively idiotic at an early age, because the scattered will cannot be transformed into life experience, which later finds expression in a calm life of thought. — This metamorphosis of inner life reveals itself to spiritual observation in the same way that spatial relationships reveal themselves. And in the same way, one learns to recognize how one must try to guide and direct the child's thoughts so that it does not later become a weak, unenergetic person, but rather absorbs ideas that lead to a certain energy of will. Anyone who believes that stimulating the will makes the will strong, and stimulating the life of thought makes thoughts strong, is on the wrong track; they do not know the weaving and life of the supersensible human being. Here is one point — and we could cite countless others — where truly penetrating the reality of existence leads directly into the practice of life. Those who, as is so popular today, want to remain with purely external reality are like a person who has a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron in front of them and says: this is a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. But another person says to them: this is a magnet. The first person replies: I don't see that, I only see a horseshoe, and I want to use it to shoe my horse. He does not see the magnet! But what can the other person do, who can add the invisible to reality! Thus, the world is permeated with something that is invisible but adds to the visible. But everywhere, reality is filled with a stream of existence that can only be recognized when one gains a relationship between the supersensible in humans and the supersensible in the surrounding existence. The fact that so much in our time makes such an unreal impression stems from the fact that people believe they are standing directly in front of the stream of reality. This is supposed to be “scientific observation.” But they do not see what lives in the depths of reality. Therefore, they are unable to recognize what weaves through human life as something real. Anyone who has a discerning sense of what is happening in the present, anyone who can compare more subtle, more intimate events with the catastrophic events that have now become humanity's misfortune, will be very, very reminded of how necessary it is, especially in our time, for an understanding of the supersensible relationship of human beings to the world to take hold again in humanity. If one asks oneself: How did it actually come about that this understanding is not there? then one can characterize it in the following way.

It is not there. Today, people who are considered particularly intelligent, and in some respects they certainly are, are very far removed from reality. I can name a book that contains no hint of reality from beginning to end, and yet, from its point of view, contains the knowledge of the whole world, for it is a dictionary, and a philosophical one at that: that of Fritz Mauthner, which today is particularly revered not so much by experts—who see through some of its amateurish aspects—but by numerous laymen or, if one may say so, “journalists.” But anyone who approaches this book with a sense of reality may be left with a peculiar feeling. Just try approaching this book with a healthy sense of reality. Start with any article, read it through, reach the end: you have gone round in circles. It's like seeing something that dazzles you; then you turn around and look again. But you get nowhere. With every article, you ask yourself: What is this actually written for? Reading this pretentious book is torture for anyone with a sense of reality. And yet it is a very clever book. I could only praise the acumen and intelligence of this book; but it is a book in which every article reminds you of the brave Münchhausen, who wanted to pull himself out of the swamp by his own hair. This book is also characteristic of much of what is thought in the present and has been done for a long time, and which lifts people out of reality, out of the supersensible. But in this supersensible, the spiritual, the real, flows. So where did it come from that man lifted himself out of the real?

Nothing can be more understanding towards true Christianity and true religiosity than what is meant here by spiritual science. But take reality, which is in many ways connected with the development of the last two millennia, and you have a strange stubbornness in this: One must seek the spirit “beyond” external nature, must regard external nature as something to be avoided if one wants to reach the spirit. Go back to earlier centuries, and you will see: there is a withdrawal from external nature and its mysteries; there is a search for a different path than the one that is spread out in nature as spirit. Then came natural science; other necessities approached human consciousness in relation to the conception of nature. But the earlier centuries had ensured that the spirit was not seen in nature; people wanted to find it apart from nature. Now it appeared before people: it had been de-spiritualized! But now people explored what they had first made of nature as a de-spiritualized nature! This has been happening for four to five centuries. And because everything from this de-spiritualized nature was seen as approaching humans with a certain necessity, humans also became de-spiritualized. The de-spiritualization of nature became a vampire on the human spirit. Nature entered science and its facts became irrefutable. I have often expressed how much admiration humans today must have for the results of natural science; but nature must not be regarded as de-spiritualized, otherwise it becomes a vampire, otherwise one can no longer find what lives and weaves in humans as spirit. Then one finds what — the barrel organ plays. And what the barrel organ plays is down in the organic. There one grasps only the organic weaving and life, only one side of life, not the other, from which we started today, which already has the supersensible stream in the power of memory.