Spiritual Science and the Future of Humanity
GA 69e — 17 May 1912, Munich
XXIII. The Nature of Spiritual-scientific Knowledge and its Significance for Human Life
Today I have the task of saying something about the nature of spiritual-scientific knowledge. The point is that here we have been speaking of spiritual-scientific knowledge in such a way that it is not so much the field that has been considered as the nature of the knowledge. For example, today's psychology is not a spiritual science in our sense, because the way psychology is treated and practised today, as only external observation, is actually a soul teaching without soul. In the official science of the soul, one finds how ideas connect to sense perception, etc. But for those who demand spiritual science in a different sense, official psychology is barren; one cannot know anything about the fate of the soul, for example after death, through it. It is possible to penetrate into the nature of the spiritual and human soul to such an extent that one can say something about the fate of the soul.
Spiritual science is misunderstood from many sides, from those who believe they are standing on the firm ground of a religious system or of science. Spiritual science, as advocated here, has basically nothing to do with religious beliefs and all religious systems. Spiritual science regards what lies in religious beliefs as a field of research and seeks what lies within them. You could just as easily call botany a meadow or a field, as you called theosophy a religious confession.
300 to 400 years ago, natural science was in such a state that great thinkers [such as] Kepler et cetera had abandoned sensory observation. Sensory observation cannot lead to truth in the field under discussion. Spiritual science wants nothing more than to fathom the highest, most valuable insights using the same logical paths as scientific insights. The botanist must bring the end of plant formation into a whole organic entity with the beginning: development from seed to flower and fruit and again to seed, etc. Goethe expressed the development of man towards old age and the decision. The spiritual and soul-like is like a seed; he says that in old age one becomes a mystic. But Goethe did not mean by “mystic” what is today understood as nebulous, but rather that man becomes more and more mature through his experiences and actions, he matures and forms the fruit of his life. We recognize this particularly by what we do wrong, but usually cannot repeat it. Experience and strength accumulate in man, which he does not use, and these strengths have their highest elasticity and are most mature immediately before death; they form the seeds, the spiritual-soul germs. The ideas and impulses in man do not pass away; they have inner effectiveness, inner activity and must continue to work. These combine to form the spiritual and soul germ, and that which has inner activity, inner strength and inner truth is what Goethe calls the mystical, and the person who grows old is what he calls a mystic.
It is different in youth: then we see what lives in the soul shooting outwards; it pushes outwards; one is an idealist, active, effective, not a mystic; from the first hour of physical existence, the soul shoots into outer activity, into outer formation, education, like the germination power in the plant. This fact escapes external psychology, the view that a spiritual-soul core lives in us, which becomes more and more impulsive towards old age and then undergoes an intermediate state, in order to penetrate into external life again afterwards. The consistent development of the methods of today's psychology, as begun by Franz von Brentano, of strictly scientific methods, will and must lead to the doctrine of reincarnation. However, for this to happen, it is necessary for man to transform himself into an instrument.
How do we understand, recognize anything at all? If we can know how things, how a work of art, is composed, if we are able to follow it in its becoming, in composition, when man himself is present. But it is not so with nature, as Goethe says; not the becoming, the become, appears before us, and the other meaningful word of Goethe's is: we do not understand the become.
But there is something where we are present in the process of becoming. Man alternately passes through the state of sleep and the state of wakefulness. What tires him? It tires him when he wears out part of his conscious activity. There is no fatigue when you let your thoughts wander freely, consciously dreaming while awake; that does not tire you. But thinking, where the conscious will is involved, it is the conscious will that makes us tired, that wears us out. Sleeping in a railroad car is not the same as resting in bed at home. Here the organism rests, while in the railroad the body remains in motion. The imposed movement contradicts the innate forces of the organism. Every time an activity is imposed on the organism from the outside that it does not have by its own nature, fatigue sets in; this is also the cause of seasickness. Every night during sleep, a becoming, an arising occurs in our organism that restores what we have previously worn out. We are in the process of becoming, but we are not aware of it.
But this is what spiritual science strives for: that people develop in such a way that they can be consciously aware of this becoming. Through meditation and concentration, they can consciously fall asleep – which, of course, is not falling asleep: you live within yourself without using your thoughts or your organism. But at first he experiences this as a miserable state, because he perceives his own brain, for example, as an obstacle; he must first work on the brain from the spiritual-soul, so to speak rework it, in order to express through the brain what one experiences spiritually and soulfully. In this process, the teacher is consciously involved in the process of becoming and works in the same constructive way on the body and the organism as the soul and spirit work on the child's organism in the process of becoming.
If one compares children whose parents are still living with those whose parents have already died, the trained observer can make many an interesting observation. For example, the teacher wants to stimulate something in a child who has lost his father early, and cannot make any progress. The sympathies and antipathies that the father had are incorporated into the child's state of mind. One can rediscover the father's sympathies or antipathies towards the mother or towards others, or the sense of how the father wanted to educate the child. Thus, pronounced antipathies, etc., occur in a striking way in the child, as a continued effect of the dead. It is the spiritual soul of the father that affects the spiritual soul of the child.
Spiritual science will not be guided by prejudices or aversions, but these will be guided by the impulses that spiritual science gives to human life.
Raphael's father was not a great painter, but when he died – Raphael was eleven years old at the time of his death – he was able to live out and develop what was in him that could not have developed in the material realm, unhindered by the physical, and this radiated into the spiritual and soul life of the boy Raphael and enabled him to overcome obstacles.
Just as our hearts and lungs do not tire because they are in harmony with the rhythm of the world, so our soul and spirit, when they live in the spiritual world, are brought into harmony with the rhythm that is their own; our feeling, sensing, thinking is imbued with this rhythm; Theosophy has a healing effect. Man is provided with a spiritual leader, which no longer lets him rush along unconsciously like a driverless locomotive, but spiritual science can be something for the soul: that it knows that it is integrated into the spiritual-soul world, and that its thoughts are connected to world thoughts, will.
Faust wants to expand his self into a kind of spiritual organism; he feels within himself the forces of the cosmos. [So one can say:]
In your thinking live world thoughts, etc.