Spiritual Science and the Future of Humanity

GA 69e — 3 January 1914, Leipzig

XVI. Spiritual Science and the Spiritual World: Outlook on the Goals of Our Time

Dear attendees! After having repeatedly spoken about various individual areas of spiritual science in this city over the past few years, allow me this evening to present some fundamental principles from the field of spiritual science to you, and then, in tomorrow's lecture, to present some of the consequences and benefits of spiritual science for practical and spiritual life.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is by no means something that can be said to be popular or even recognized in wider circles in our present time. On the contrary, from the most diverse sides and points of view, one will have to hear again and again the most diverse objections of the opposition to this spiritual science. Wherever one wishes to advocate it, one must be prepared for the most diverse misunderstandings that are brought against it.

As on previous occasions, I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize right at the outset that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science will not be surprised, but will consider it quite natural, that the points of view from which we are starting here will meet with opponents and be misunderstood. Indeed, anyone who is familiar with this subject will be quite clear about the fact that, according to the habits of thought and imagination of the present time, according to the general, one might say generally recognized or believed, aims of our present time, this spiritual science must still find opponents for the time being. In this respect, it is no different from the one whose continuation for our time it seeks to be. However strange it may seem to some, it must be said that this spiritual science is the continuation of, or at least seeks to be, what has emerged with regard to nature through the newer natural science at the dawn of modern spiritual life.

Just as in those days, by elevating and rising above traditional views and received ideas, one went directly to nature itself, so in our time spiritual science wants to go directly to the world of the spiritual, to the processes of the spiritual. And one can say: Nothing is more unfounded than when it is asserted from any quarter that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be opposed to natural science. On the contrary, anyone who has a clear insight into spiritual science will fully recognize and correctly assess the significant advances and the great blessings that the scientific view and way of thinking have brought.

Spiritual science cannot, as it were, follow the example of natural science in the realm of the spiritual, and apply the methods and way of thinking that are common in natural science, for the reason that a correct adherence to the natural scientific attitude requires something different for the study of the spiritual.

But before I proceed to our actual consideration, I would like to explain how this spiritual science is the continuation of scientific thinking by means of a kind of parable. This parable is not intended to say anything in particular, but only to express the relationship between scientific progress and what spiritual science seeks to be.

If we cast our soul's eye on the activity of the farmer who sows his grain at the appropriate time of year, we find that this grain rises, that by far the largest part of this grain is used for human nutrition. Only a small part of the sown seed is used to be returned to the element of the earth and to become grain again. So let me look at what scientific thinking has brought us over the centuries in the light of the demands of spiritual research. Science has brought us, one might say, a complete transformation of the face of our earth. It has intervened in all of human life, right down to our everyday lives. For all around us we can see the fruits of modern science. But in addition to all this, we also owe it an insight into the connections between world phenomena, into the realm of the senses, which mankind would hardly have dreamed of before. But we also owe it something else: a sum of ideas, concepts and perceptions has emerged; they have become established over the last three, especially the last century. People's minds had to come to terms with these ideas. They had to answer the often puzzling question: How can the soul come to a state of harmony within itself when it has to come to terms with the ideas and concepts that scientific thinking has brought forth, and with the feelings that follow from this scientific thinking?

I would compare the new ideas, concepts and notions that have been instilled into our souls in just a few centuries with the relatively few seeds that are sown to bear fruit the following year; compared to what is used from the harvested fruits for human food. In the realm of scientific thinking, we can compare what is used for human nutrition with what is spread into our external cultural life, what is used for human benefit and for the knowledge of the connections in the sensory world. But what has been raised in new ideas, concepts and perceptions sinks into our soul, and is entrusted again to the element from which it emerged. We should live with this, and try to bring our innermost soul powers and soul harmony into connection with it. In contrast to this, we should ask: How is it possible to have security, hope and joy in our work in life?

Not only what is given to us theoretically through scientific ideas and concepts should be considered, but also what the soul experiences through them. For it is precisely these scientific ideas, when used as indicated in the following consideration, that give the soul the most beautiful direction to the spirit through themselves. They lead the life of the soul directly into the realm of the spirit. Although this is a result of life for all those who have studied spiritual science as it is meant here, it must seem strange to those who have not done so when it is said that this spiritual science wants to be a true successor to natural science. For precisely because it enters the spiritual realm, the scientific method must take on a different form in order to remain true to the scientific spirit.

And to bring this form to mind, I would like to compare spiritual science with spiritual chemistry, to make myself understood, with reference to the way it gains its results. Not that I want to say anything special with this comparison, but the comparison can lead us to understand what will be meant by the following remarks. If we have water in front of us, we cannot see what components it has in the sense of today's chemistry; that it consists of hydrogen and oxygen cannot be seen from the outside. With the means of chemistry, we can come to know: water has a completely different property, a completely different characteristic; it is liquid, it extinguishes fire. The hydrogen can burn itself, is gaseous. That this water contains something like hydrogen can only be known by separating this hydrogen from the water.

In a very similar way, but with the help of spiritual methods, something must be done with the human being himself for the purpose of spiritual science. Just as he appears to us in the outer world, he cannot be recognized in his components, just as water cannot be recognized in its components. What the human being is in spirit and soul, what every soul longs to know, is bound to the body in ordinary life as hydrogen is bound to water, and cannot be recognized in its very nature within the body, just as hydrogen cannot be recognized in water.

Now the methods by which we separate the spiritual and mental from the physical are not as robust, not directed towards handling in the sensory world as the chemical method by which hydrogen is separated from water. But that does not make them any less to be taken in a strictly scientific sense. These are methods that take place entirely within the life of the soul itself. They are delicate, subtle processes of the soul's life. It is not by external manipulations that one can arrive at the riddles of the spiritual life. The only instrument available to man to penetrate into the spiritual world is man himself, and that is his spiritual-soul life.

How is it that we, hypothetically speaking, separate this spiritual-soul life from the physical life with which it is connected in everyday life? The methods used are not ones that resort to anything particularly miraculous; they are extensions of mental activities that every person is familiar with in their daily life; only these mental activities have to be extended into the realm of unlimited strength. But this requires a resignation, a devotion in the soul life, for which one must first prepare oneself. You can find a more detailed description of the method by which the soul can penetrate into the spiritual world in my books “The Secret Science in Outline” and “How to Know Higher Worlds?” To begin with, there is an activity of the soul that is familiar to everyone, that is needed in everyday life, that is needed for the health of the soul, and that is therefore applied by the soul in ordinary life. For the purposes of spiritual science, however, it must be intensified to an unlimited degree. It is what can be called: turning one's attention, one's interest, to something. We all know that in order to get along in life, in order to find our way in the world, we cannot just go along indifferently, but we have to turn our attention to the most diverse things. And the more we do this, the more it becomes, in our minds, our own, the more we carry a sign of it through our further life and have connected with it.

And attention is intimately connected with another soul ability, the significance of which for life everyone must recognize, namely with what we call memory. And one can even say: in a sense, the question of a good memory in the human soul is the same question as that of the activity of attention. An object to which we only fleetingly turn our attention fades from our memory. An object to which we turn our attention, and repeatedly at that – repetition is often important – becomes our mental property.

Everyone can see for themselves the importance of attention for memory in the most mundane of everyday life. Let me give you a trivial example: Who hasn't woken up in the morning and not found things that they put down the night before? If you practice it, let's say, not just putting your cufflinks down, but paying attention to the act of putting them down, linking the thought to it: Now I'm putting this object down - then tomorrow you will go straight to the place where you put the object down. That is, the power that inscribes in our memory what is to be inscribed, that is attention.

And anyone who has taken a little look at the inner life of humanity will often notice at least echoes of that unhealthiness of the inner life, or have heard of it, which consists in the human soul not being able to remember what it has experienced as if the experiences were its own experiences. We then speak of a split in the ego in the face of such an unhealthy inner life. It may happen to such a soul that things it has experienced itself, so to speak, belong to another self. This radical case is less common, but it does occur.

However, the ego's full context, its continuity, is disturbed with regard to a clear insight into one's own past, and this happens more often. This could be prevented if the good pedagogical principle were more introduced into life, to awaken attention, interest in what is going on as important in our environment, as in general the connection between attention and a healthy spiritual life should play the very greatest role in pedagogy.

Thus we see that attention is something we need for our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must develop this attention, that is, the activity that is exercised by directing the soul power to a specific object, by drawing it away from other objects at that moment and concentrating it on a specific object. The soul researcher must develop this activity of the soul life, which and slight in everyday attention, to an unlimited strength; that is, he must take it upon himself to do such soul exercises again and again, which are an unlimited intensification of what would otherwise be active in the soul life as attention and interest. This is called, in a technical expression of spiritual science, the concentration of thinking or feeling. All soul forces can be concentrated again and again, drawn together to one point. This must be repeated again and again, because it often takes many, many years to make the soul a true instrument of spiritual research. To achieve this, one must repeatedly and repeatedly concentrate the soul forces on an idea or a feeling that one has moved into the center of one's soul life only through one's own will. It is best to draw into the soul life an image that one has really put together, for example, a symbolic image, a symbol; what one has borrowed from the outer life, to that one is too accustomed used to; a greater effort is required if one contracts one's mental life, all the forces that one otherwise disperses, to the mental processes, to an arbitrary compilation that one always returns to the center of one's mental life. In this way, a state gradually becomes possible for the human being, which allows his spiritual-soul, which is otherwise poured out into the physical-bodily, to be grasped by the same power that is concentrated there, and finally set free from the physical-bodily. There is no other way to be convinced in practice that there is really a second person in us, a spiritual-soul person, just as hydrogen is in water, if you do not grasp this soul-spiritual person by he is permeated by what is the unlimited amplification of the activity of ordinary attention, and in doing so, he is so strengthened in himself, this soul-spiritual human being, that he stands out from the physical-bodily. He is lifted out of the physical-bodily in this way, as hydrogen is lifted out of water through chemical processes.

If everything that has now been discussed in principle is undertaken by the soul, as indicated in the books mentioned earlier, we can extract the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily through purely soul-related activities.

If this is really successful, then a great change occurs in the inner life of the person. One receives completely new inner concepts of life. One is seized, so to speak, by something within oneself, of which one had not even had a correct idea before. Above all, in this way one is brought to a certain concept, to an idea, with which one can now connect a sense of what it means to be outside one's body and yet still lead a fully conscious life; to be able to grasp oneself inwardly, to take hold of oneself inwardly, without doing so through the tools of the senses, through the physical tools of the brain.

The next thing to happen to the spiritual researcher on the indicated path, when he has come far enough, is that a state comes over him that can only be compared in ordinary life to something that occurs involuntarily. The human being reaches a state in which, just as the external sensory world fades away when falling asleep, so too does this sensory world now, as it were, lift itself away from the human being, as it does when falling asleep. But the human being also experiences this: he feels his physical body passing over in complete calm, in complete inner serenity, and now fully consciously, as it otherwise happens unconsciously in sleep. Nothing of what can otherwise stir in the body through everyday activity then stirs. The human being, with his soul-spiritual, has emerged from the physical-bodily.

For the first time, the human being now has an idea of what it means to face my body as I would otherwise face an external object. In ordinary life, one only has an idea of what it means to experience oneself when one is, as it were, inside one's body; in this way the body is connected to oneself; one relates to it quite differently than to other things. But now one's own body becomes an external object, which one faces as one used to face other external objects. But one does not face it as it appears to us physically as long as we use the tools of the physical world. How it appears to us, how we face this body, turns out to be a harrowing event that man can undergo on the way to spiritual research.

What I am about to describe can be experienced in many different forms and in many different ways. In a small book, 'A Path to Self-Knowledge of Man', I have attempted to describe a typical form in which it can occur. From this description, one can get an idea of what the spiritual researcher has to experience at a certain stage. But, as I said, it is only a typical form, it can always be different. Let us say that a person is directly involved in their outer life, or even asleep during sleep. This event can occur during sleep or during wakefulness; it will never disturb the healthy life of the soul in any way if it happens correctly. In the midst of waking, in the midst of sleep while sleeping, in such a way that it is more than even the most vivid dream – it can overtake us, this event, so that we feel something like what [I] would like to express in the following words – one can only stammer what is experienced by the soul: What is happening to me? It is as if lightning, as if fire, were flashing through the air; as if the room in which I am were illuminated by lightning; as if my own body were being struck by lightning and destroyed by the elements. It is not just a matter of what I can describe in words, but of what kind of inner experience one has at this point in one's soul development. What matters is that one knows from now on: one has experienced in one's mind what it means to live in one's soul and spirit in such a way that one is lifted out of the physical body; that the image of the physical body presents itself to one. But it is an image that cannot help but represent the physical body in a state of destruction.

And then you realize what you are actually experiencing when you can really immerse yourself in what you have felt. You come to realize: yes, when you are in the midst of life, your spiritual and soul self is indeed an independent being. But the way you experience everyday life is bound to your physical body. Throughout life - even science admits this - the spiritual and soul destroys the physical and bodily. From the moment we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep at night, we use our physical body as a tool for what arises in our soul, in our ideas and feelings. Fatigue expresses the destruction of the soul life. Sleep is the compensation. The fact that we experience the soul life depends on the fact that, basically, we carry out a continuous work of destruction on our body, which ends with death. This is evident from the image that shows us: the moment you become aware that your soul and spirit are independent and can emancipate themselves from the body, you experience your body as if it were destroying itself before you.

Spiritual science – not as it should be considered in our time according to the scientific education that humanity has enjoyed for centuries, but as it has gone through the various epochs – spiritual science has always existed, only very few people have known about it. But those who knew about it also knew the harrowing moment in the spiritual researcher's life that I have just described, and they called it by saying the words: I have come to the gates of death. — That is, one has come to know in the image what death is; one has come to know how, in death, the spiritual-soul triumphs in its independence from the physical-bodily. From the point where one has experienced this, one knows what it means to live independently in one's spiritual-soul. One knows that this spiritual-soul life, in its separation from the bodily, is something that has completely different qualities from the bodily.

But it is true in a certain way that what gives progress towards the spirit is linked to difficulties of the inner life; it can even become a kind of inner martyrdom. Above all, patience is needed to concentrate the soul's power in such a way that the soul-spiritual, emancipated from the physical, can grasp itself in its independence. I wanted to describe this to you as it happened because I do not want to speak in general terms, but because I want to tell of the living experiences of the spiritual researcher himself.

From that moment on, you know what it means to live outside your body, especially in terms of thinking. You now associate a certain sense, a sense full of reality, with it when you say: I now know that I think, that I can form ideas not as in everyday life; I now know that I can form ideas with the soul that has left the brain, purely in a spiritual and mental way. And because I don't want to speak in general terms, I don't want to shy away from something that, when viewed superficially, can appear very vulnerable: in the moment when you have the described experience, you experience yourself in your thinking, which, for the moments when you leave your own body, is no longer tied to the brain; you feel as if you are living outside the brain, in the environment of the brain. And you know: if you want to think again as you do in everyday life, you have to submerge yourself in your brain again. You begin to see it as something external that you have to submerge into.

One thing is necessary if you have progressed to this point. And what I will mention here as necessary can also refute the objections of those who do not know spiritual science and, from the point of view of today's science, would like to push what the spiritual researcher experiences into the category of hallucinations. They are talking about something they have no idea about. For it is precisely the spiritual researcher who knows how to distinguish at every moment what the difference is between a hallucination, an illusion and what he really experiences as something spiritual. In ordinary everyday life, too, it is no different than learning to distinguish reality from mere imagination through life itself. In ordinary life, one can easily distinguish the idea of a hot iron and the actual perception of a hot iron when one touches it. It is the same when you really immerse yourself in the spiritual world in the way described.

But what is necessary is that you feel what you are experiencing now so inwardly, imbued with this inner strength, that you are immersed in it with your will. For let us not mistake: what one experiences as a world of ideas that is outside of the body must arise as an experience in such a way that one does not feel it at first as an external being, but one must feel it as one feels one's hand, one's foot, one's eye; one must feel it as a spiritual sense organ. You must first know exactly: what you have developed within you is a part of your spiritual-soul being; it is something within you that you must use in the same way as you would use your hand to grasp something or your eye to see by looking into it.

In this way, one first develops the organs. One does something within oneself that is as subtle as a web of dreams in relation to external reality, but whose reality one experiences. One does something with one's spiritual-soul being; one is involved with one's will. One must experience something in the new being that one has drawn out of one's body, which one can describe as an inner play of facial expressions. Just as one is able to express one's thinking and feeling with the muscles of one's face, and to express one's soul experiences in one's gaze, so one must now develop the ability to have a clearly conscious inner handling of the spiritual-soul being that has been raised out of the body. One must be able to express oneself through this being. In short, one must have the feeling: In what you have made out of yourself, you are involved with the will. Not like in dreams; the dream presents images to us, but these images occur without our will. It is different when we bring ourselves, through genuine spiritual development, to experience something outside of our body. There we ourselves are the actors who make an image, which arises to the highest intensity, disappear, and bring it from one place to another. We are so immersed in this world of images that we can control it, that we can whirl it around.

In the same way that we have become familiar with this through the exercises we have performed, which, after all, are basically only the training of our external attention to an unlimited degree of mental and spiritual concentration, we initially only manage to make ourselves mentally and spiritually independent beings. We do not yet perceive other spiritual processes and spiritual entities that are around us. In order to do that, we have to add other categories of exercises to those that fall under attention, so to speak, that are completely opposed to attention.

But spiritual progress depends on not just practicing one-sidedly, but on alternately exerting our soul in practicing in one direction or the other. We have to do the most intense exercises in increasing our attention. But at the same time, we have to do inner exercises that are exactly the opposite. We must also do the opposite of what happens in ordinary life. For example, when a being loves another so devotedly that he feels absorbed in that being, or when any being is completely devoted to something that concerns him in prayer or in other religious sentiments. Devotion, which we also have in ordinary life, as we have attention, but again increased to infinity. We must really, quite arbitrarily, through a strong volition, bring about the suppression of all external sensory perception, as it otherwise only happens in sleep. One gradually acquires the ability to suppress, so to speak, everything that is necessary for everyday sensory life, right down to the involuntary muscles and other organic tools; completely, with the exclusion of what is ordinary sensory life, to devote himself with his soul to that which is most immediately presented by us as the Divine-Spiritual, which stands beyond all concepts, permeating and flowing through the world. In particular, we must try to suppress everything that otherwise occupies us in our judgment. We must accept the arbitrary faculty of everyday activity and, in the innermost serenity and devotion, live consciously of nothing but the expectation: What comes to you when you suppress everything arbitrary that otherwise made an impression on you, and when you are devoted to what you will come to know? This devotion must be increased to the point of infinity, then the moment will come when we can use what we have developed in terms of spiritual and mental being, emancipated from our self.

Then the images that we have placed within us will become us in such a way that we connect spiritually with a spiritual world; but in such a way that we now connect with this world not passively, as in everyday life, but actively. In the everyday world, we are outside of an object that we look at. If we want to penetrate the spiritual world, we have to immerse ourselves in the object and merge with it, become one with it, as one as we were before only with our own soul.

And just as we express through our facial expressions what lives in our soul, so it is when, after sufficient devotion, we immerse ourselves in a real, a spiritual world, that we recognize in it, that we live in the activity of our spiritual soul, that we express states of the spiritual world within us. We experience them through inner facial expressions, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world, which we can only grasp by actively immersing ourselves in it. We have to acquire a spiritual facial expression in the spiritual world; we have to acquire the ability to express ourselves.

Then we know that a spiritual world is always around us, just as, for example, the world of a language is also around a deaf-mute child, but he knows nothing about it; he does not get to this world of language, even though his speech organs are quite healthy. He is unable to imitate in speech what he does not hear, to express it in facial expressions. Just as the world of words is also around the deaf-mute child, so the world of spiritual entities and spiritual processes is always around every human being.

And just as the human being only has to open up to the outside world and imitate the words in language, so the human being, as a spiritual and soul being, has to open up to the spiritual world through devotion in order to express through mimicry what he experiences, through the means he has cultivated within himself. For the spiritual world is only received through active engagement and not passively. What we do not experience in ourselves through the spiritual world, as if through an inner mimicry, cannot reveal itself to us. We must become one with the spiritual world so that we can develop the spiritual mimicry in what we are revealed, by immersing ourselves in the spiritual world. This mimicry then brings us to the awareness through our own experience: You are now experiencing conditions of the spiritual world. What I have described can be experienced by detaching the power of thought from the physical tool, from the brain.

But there is another power in us that can be released from the physical tool, namely what is called the human power of speech, and, related to this, the power of memory. Both belong to the same kind of soul activity. Just as we have drawn our thinking out of the bodily tool, so we arrive, by continuing our exercises, at being able to grasp the spiritual-soul power by which we otherwise speak. When you think about me as I speak to you now, my spiritual-soul life is active. But this activity is first transmitted to the brain, then to the speech organs, and then to the air. First, it is a spiritual-soul force that then flows outwards. If, by continuing our intensified devotion, we succeed in excluding everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in developing in the soul and spirit that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we succeed in doing so without speaking, even without making that inner, fine vibration, which even in ordinary thinking sounds like a soft, inaudible speaking, and which is also admitted by modern science, if we succeed in doing so, we exclude everything that is connected with speech in the body, but in the soul and spirit we develop that which is otherwise poured out into speech, if we thus leave the power of speech inwardly, if we inwardly leave that which is expressed in speech, then we can, through the power of our soul and spirit, make ourselves heard in the air. body is bound to speech, but in the spiritual and soul life, develop that which is otherwise poured into speech, so if one leaves the power of speech inwardly, if one is silent with regard to what is expressed in speech, but still applies the power inwardly, then one reaches a further stage in spiritual research. One reaches the point where one experiences not only that as

something external, which one can call one's body; one now comes to recognize: You are an independent entity that can lift itself out of its inner soul life of everyday life. One separates oneself, just as one used to separate from the body, from what is ordinary thinking, feeling and imagining. And the same thing that you develop in speech, you also develop in memory, as you accumulate external stimuli and impressions in the course of your life. The soul power that inspires speech is active in memory.

But now, when you experience yourself outside of your everyday mental life, you have another harrowing event. For now one experiences, as in a review, the whole past life up to the point where one can normally remember back, a point in childhood. What one has lived through comes to mind in distinct images, in ever clearer and clearer images, but not as one's ordinary memory is, but quite differently.

I would like to explain this with an example. Let's assume we have done something morally objectionable. You look back on it. It appears in the picture and it shows you: By doing this, you have strayed from the true image of a human being that you are supposed to represent. That is how far you have fallen in becoming human. — It stands before you as a warning, so that you cannot say otherwise than: Until I have overcome, through a further life, through corresponding good actions, what I am overlooking here, I must always look at it when I experience myself outside of my own soul life.

This is the case with good and bad, with all experiences that one has gone through. One's past life trails behind one like a comet's tail; but now so changed that it shows one what one has to do in order to balance out what should not have been done, and so that one can make appropriate use of what one has done in the world. The experiences of one's own life are grouped together in such a way that they become an externally complicated overall experience. It is permeated, as it were, by an inner power that one perceives, of which one is now aware: it was always in you, you just did not perceive it, the power to extinguish a deficiency; a real power, something that you have achieved as an ability to apply fruitfully. Now you get a full idea with inner reality: a plant develops from the soil. It unfolds leaf by leaf, draws its life together in a narrow germ. But in this germ, life is so concentrated that it contains the possibility of a new plant developing. Just as there is physical force in this seed, so we realize that, owing to what we have lived through and which we only recognize in its true form when we survey it, we have within us a force like a germinating power that must continue to work on the basis of what we have experienced. From now on you know: When death comes upon you, there is a spiritual-soul germ in you that passes through the gate of death and lives on, as surely as the germ of the plant lives on. An ever-victorious spiritual germ springs from your inner being. From that moment on you know: When your body falls away, your soul and spirit will pass through death into the spiritual world.

When one studies a life that enters the world, a child's life, which basically represents the greatest mystery for the spiritual researcher, when one studies a child's life with this knowledge, or one's own childhood – because from now on one can look back further into one's life – or when one child, then it becomes clear to you how ability after ability unfolds in development, how the child's features become more and more defined, more and more certain, how talents emerge. It becomes clear to you: just as the plant grows from the germ, so what sprouts from the spiritual world comes out of it. It is the same thing that we recognized earlier as conquering death. It comes back into the world, and our spiritual and soul life develops out of what we have carried through death. Now we know what it means to repeat life on earth. We know that we live alternately; that we live between birth and death in a physical body, that we then pass through death and live in a spiritual world. We know that every birth means: something from the spiritual world descends and connects with what comes from the father and mother. It works through the fruits of a previous life, which project into this life in one's destiny.

By emancipating the power of speech within us, by developing that which we waste in life, so to speak, in language, in special moments of practice within, so that it remains in the soul, we thus become immersed in the spiritual world in which we find ourselves, going from life to life, because we now experience not states but processes of the spiritual world. In this way we ascend from conditions to processes.

In practice, the spiritual researcher first reaches out like a spiritual tentacle to grasp what is outside of him, where he had previously only perceived conditions. But now the spiritual researcher experiences that he, with his emancipated soul life, which has also taken in the power of speech, emerges completely from himself and immerses himself in the other beings in such a way that he knows: you are now moving from being to being in the spiritual world; you are immersing yourself in the spiritual world. Most of the time it will be like this: Until one has a complete skill in coming to an experience of conditions, one must try to give oneself so far; then one feels as if awakened to another state.

In this way, one experiences events by really living them inwardly, by emerging and submerging with them. One could say that one now experiences events in the spiritual world not through inner facial expressions but through inner gestures. Just as one experiences events in the outer world through movement, so in the spiritual world one must take part in the movement; one must go along with the events. So you move up from inner facial expressions to inner gestures, and gradually you perceive not only conditions but also processes in the spiritual world.

And finally, if you practice this more and more, if you really develop it systematically, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, if you continue with the two categories of inner practice, what falls under the category of attention and what falls under the category of devotion, we also call it concentration and meditation, then, my dear audience, then one finally arrives at a third, at a third, which I must hint at in the following way.

Something is reserved for man – I know that this is open to criticism from the point of view of superficial external science, but it is nevertheless true; I just lack the time to prove it now, but it can be proved – man has an advantage over the other creatures on earth in that he actually only becomes himself in the course of life, compared to the beings that stand in the world as he does. For when we come into the world, we have to crawl on all fours. Other creatures, the animals, are not dependent on the outset, but they are different from the human being, they have incorporated forces that give them the position they should take in life. Man must rise in the course of life to that of which one can say: it actually makes him a human being in the physical sense. Again and again, great thinkers have pointed out what man is by rising from the ground and directing his face outwards. But man only makes himself into that by directing his willpower. He has an inner directing power through which he brings himself into alignment with the cosmos, through which he is human in the physical sense. This is what inner spiritual-soul forces are for. But in ordinary life they are poured entirely into the physical.

Now, dear attendees, just as one can emancipate the power of thought from the physical body, so too can one emancipate the powers through which we first make ourselves human in the world in the physical sense. And just as one can allow what would otherwise pour out through speech to remain in the inner life of the soul, and thus arrive at an inner gesture, so one can inwardly emancipate the powers of uprightness through practice. Then, through the use of these inner forces, one comes to understand beings in the spiritual world that are different from human beings. The fact that we only know human beings in the physical world comes from the fact that we have used the forces that are the directing forces to make human beings what they are. If we practice emancipating these forces inwardly, we get to know beings that are somewhat different from human beings. This leads to an inner study of physiognomy. One imitates the forms of the other beings with which one then comes into contact. In short, one now enters into a living relationship with the spiritual world. One takes on the physiognomy of the beings with which one comes into contact. I would like to repeat what has been said: through inner mimicry one comes to states; through inner gesture one comes to processes; through inner physiognomy one comes to really get to know the spiritual world as such.

I have tried to show you in real terms how true spiritual research becomes immersed in the spiritual world, how man really comes to grasp a spiritual world. Spiritual science is just as much a science as chemistry, physics and so on. What can be presented to humanity through this spiritual science needs to be accepted just as little on authority as the results of other sciences. Tomorrow I will describe how this spiritual science can become part of a person's life.

When we consider the aims of our time, we may say to ourselves: precisely the great, the admirable progress of natural science has accustomed people to accepting what is to be accepted as true only when the truth is presented to them in such a way that they can remain passive. Every step in spiritual research, however, shows us that we have to actively familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world; that we first have to create the expression for what we want to perceive. Spiritual science is to natural science as activity is to passivity. One need only glance around at our contemporary circumstances to see that people are inclined to say: “That's fantasy!” if something does not confront them in such a way that they can remain passive. In this way, spiritual science is fundamentally opposed to the currents of the time.

But on the other hand, it happens in life that where something has soared to the highest power, its opposite is done. For anyone who can search the souls of the present, it is quite clear that in the depths of the souls of people today there lives a longing to experience something of that activity through which man can also cognitively grasp his eternal, his immortal, his connection with the divine. It is only natural that on the one hand opposition after opposition is directed against spiritual science, because education in natural science has led to passivity. But in the depths of the soul there is a yearning, a yearning that awaits fulfillment. Many souls live in the present, unaware that their insecurity, their not knowing what to do with themselves, simply comes from the fact that they have the longing to come together with the spiritual, and that they cannot do so. They long for spiritual science.

Therefore, one can say: No matter how much what appears on the surface to be approaching the souls is opposed to the aims of our time, in truth the souls long for the aims that spiritual science sets itself. One could show from many things that confront us in the present how man at the present time wants to be completely passively devoted to the outside world; how he wants to receive everything that he is to accept as true from outside. People are happy to go to a lecture that is advertised as including “slides”. No claim is made other than to surrender passively, to look, to receive sensations that are at most supported by words. It is different where a lecture without slides demands that one work in one's soul.

And so it is basically in the broadest scope of our lives. After all, one thing has been able to take hold in our time: A very popular magazine recently published an essay that contains the following: the author has a respected name as a philosopher; he is also rightly admired for many things. I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that I always make it a point to only quote opponents that I can also respect; and I would like to mention a respected man to you now. But this man has come to a strange idea. He says: When you read Kant or Spinoza, it is difficult to read; the concepts are all over the place. But couldn't it be made easier? Today we have slides, film, and the cinema. You could show people Spinoza sitting there grinding lenses. That would be the first image. It transforms itself. The thought “substance” appears in his mind. The thought of substance appears. In the next image, “Thought and Expansion” and so on. Spinoza's “Ethics” - that is the name of the work I have just mentioned - it will be a nice future prospect to be able to walk past a movie theater and read on the posters: “Spinoza's Ethics” or “Kant's Critique of Pure Reason”.

Dear attendees! I only mention such things because they grotesquely show you where the goals of our time are heading and how they are opposed to the goals of spiritual science, in which everything is activity in order to strengthen activity in the human being, to make the human being more and more independent and independent. The person who reprinted the aforementioned essay in his newspaper said that one would have to have great hopes if something like this could be realized; it would fulfill the metaphysical yearning of human beings. The spiritual researcher, however, cannot hope for this fulfillment. He must therefore accept being scolded for being “superficial” because he cannot hope for much from Spinoza's “Ethics” and Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in film.

I need not go into the individual goals of our time any further; I need only present the general character of passivity that was bound to arise from it, because through the wonderful deepening of external life, man has become accustomed to being active in that to which he can add nothing. But the more people of the present time wrap themselves in such passivity, the more the longing will awaken for that activity of the soul through which man can feel himself as an eternal, as an independent, as a being independent of the body beings that conquers death because it has powers within itself that have nothing to do with birth and death, but that point back to earlier lives on earth and point forward to a later and eternal existence.

I only wanted to characterize; I did not want to hint at the details of what I would like to call a glimpse into the future of human development.

What is the purpose of this activity? We will look at tomorrow at what spiritual science is intended to be as a way of life. But what can it lead to?

Now, let us take a look at the basic character of our time, at the world view that seeks to create a world picture only from materialistic-sensory facts. This is not very consistent, otherwise one would have to say: according to this world view, as it is beginning to emerge in the sense of a misunderstood Darwinism, the human being is said to have arisen purely, without any spiritual-soul element connecting to his physical body, which has arisen out of animality, man is supposed to have arisen out of animality; and the qualities of thinking, feeling and willing, the quality of religious deepening and so on, are supposed to be only an intensification of what appears at a lower level in animals.

It is superficial to speak of living in a transitional period with regard to certain things. Every time is a transitional period. But one may say, and that is what matters: with regard to such things, this time is a transitional period. And I would like to ask your permission to suggest, perhaps somewhat grotesquely, but thereby particularly clearly, how spiritual science wants to relate to the goals of our time. We have only not been consistent enough, otherwise we could say the following, precisely from the materialistic way of thinking: Whatever is meant by what is stated in the Bible at the beginning of human development with the appearance of the spirit, which is symbolized by the serpent; what word resounds from this symbol?

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

However you may feel about this symbol, it is a significant saying, a saying that is connected with everything we call “freedom” in human beings. A great saying that goes deep into human nature: “You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.” If one were as consistent as the snake was consistent, if one is a materialist or a monist, then one would not, inconsistently, veil what one would actually have to say with this composition: everything that man can immerse himself in is an intensification of what comes to light in the animal's instinctual life. It is as if the tempter were standing before us and calling out to us: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.” For when everything is harnessed to the objective-physical law of nature, then everything proceeds as animal life proceeds. Thus, the tempter's words stand before us as the goal of our time: “You will be like the animals, no longer distinguishing good from evil.”

Between these two extremes lies the true progress of the human being. Spiritual science is intended to lift humanity above what it can only gain from the contemplation of sensual reality, to which it may only passively surrender. Instead, spiritual science is intended to intervene in the cultural world and give it goals that lie in the activity of the soul, which places man in the world in such a way that he can better find his progress in the development of freedom and all that is human in the right middle between divinity and animality.

With these true goals of spiritual science, one is certainly in harmony with all those personalities who, in the course of human development, have tried to gain a feeling and a sense of the true essence of man through deep soul contemplation. Even in ancient times, spiritual science was able to express clearly what it can express today, although it could not be expressed as clearly as it is possible in our time because we have the model of natural science before us. It was felt and sensed by all those spirits, all those personalities who took genuine human progress seriously. They were far, far from allowing the direction of their thinking to be confined to a goal that must be characterized as follows: You will be like animals and no longer distinguish good from evil; your thoughts will be no more than the highest activity of your brain, just as magnetism is the highest activity of that which can take place in the material processes of iron.

How many great minds from centuries past could resound in our poetry and thought! Let us mention just one, in whose words I would like to summarize what I wanted to present here today. Let me quote a saying of Schiller, who also wanted to realize how it is with the relationship of man to the developing animal world; how it was in the formation of the earth, when man appeared, in addition to the other beings. Truly, even deeper than he could feel, we would like to express Schiller's words from a spiritual scientific point of view, as a feeling summary of their most important result, knowing that the correct position of man in the universe is expressed in such a word:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped out of the cloudy brow,
And the lofty stranger, Thought,
Leaped from the wondering brain.