Ways to a Knowledge of the Eternal Forces of the Human Soul

GA 70b — 12 January 1916, Basel

7. How Can Research into the Supersensible Essence of Man be Brought About?

Basel, January 12, 1916

Dear attendees!

In earlier lectures on spiritual science that I have been privileged to give here, I have repeatedly indicated that anyone who is grounded in this spiritual science, as it is meant here, is well aware that, from the present habits of thought, from all that one is accustomed to regarding as truth research, much, much can be objected to, and that it is quite understandable to the spiritual researcher himself when what he has to present is initially seen as fantasy, reverie or perhaps worse. Nevertheless, today, since it is possible to continue the reflections the day after tomorrow, I would still like to arrange what I have to say today as if the very obvious objections that can be raised against spiritual science from a scientific, religious and so on point of view were initially disregarded. This evening, I would like to consider the spiritual science, the essence of the research into the supersensible worlds, without taking any of these objections into account. The day after tomorrow, I will address these objections, which can be described as objections and apparent refutations from a wide range of perspectives.

In fact, dear attendees, all of humanity's deeper thinking and research has always been aimed at recognizing the essence of the human being itself as a supersensible one, because in the study of the essence of the human being, it becomes clear to the observer, let us say, to the philosophical observer, for example, that it is a matter of course that one which one is accustomed in the sensual world, one cannot approach the real essence of man; or at least - if one believes that in all that the senses can see, what the mind bound to the brain can explore, if one also believes that one can grasp the essence of man in this way, as the more or less materialistically inclined monism believes, then it always turns out – that for a deeper reflection of the thinker or researcher, what can be said from such sides about the nature of man, leaves the deeper needs of knowledge unsatisfied, and that one still has the feeling, the sensation, that something must be able to come from some side that shows the essence of man outside the sensual world.

I would like to draw attention to one of the very first thinkers in the development of human thought who endeavored, through the most strenuous thinking, to point out to his students at the university, to his listeners in the lecture itself, how one can immediately emerge from what does not allow the being of the human being to be recognized, to what one can find it in, in the inner life of the soul. This thinker is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And in a way that one might say was paradoxical, he tried to show his listeners how the soul should move, as it were, in order to find its way from the sensory into the supersensible. For example, at the beginning of lectures he would say to his listeners: “Try to think of the wall.” Now, of course, that was easy. The listeners tried to put themselves in the state of mind in which they thought the wall. So after he had let his listeners think the wall for a while, he said: “So now try to think the one who thought the wall.” And that had the immediately convincing effect that Fichte knew how to achieve: it amazed his listeners, so much so that we contemporaries, who have recorded this scene, can describe how amazed the listeners actually were, how you could see that they were now making an effort to think the one who had previously thought the wall – how thinking slackened in a certain way, how it did not venture to go to the point to which it was being pointed.

Goethe, who approached the questions of knowledge primarily from a very human point of view, namely from the point of view of fruitful life, once made the statement that – one might say – is illuminated precisely that one refers to Fichte's claim in such a way as it has just been done – Goethe made the statement that he had behaved wisely in a certain way by avoiding thinking about thinking. He, who in everything he did for the soul wanted to sense direct life, felt very particularly that with this attempt to think thinking, man is led first of all to a kind of impossibility if he only sticks to ordinary thinking. And yet, anyone who begins to research the supersensible worlds can only initially rely on thinking, because they soon realize that what the senses can teach them or what can be combined from sensory phenomena still raises questions that, to a certain extent, lead the human being outside of their actual being. In thinking, he is with himself, and he can hope, at least, that if he really gets into the inner movement of thinking with the power of his soul, something may perhaps reveal itself to him that leads to the actual being of the human being.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is a peculiar phenomenon that the further one gets in thinking, as it exists in ordinary life, the more one struggles with this thinking, the more intense the doubts become, with this thinking somehow to find a gateway into the world in which the actual essence of man is. Yes, from what one experiences inwardly in thinking, one really does come, in the end, to the conviction that one can actually — let me use the trivial comparison — one can actually think thinking just as little as one can wash water.

And yet, the real methods, the real way to penetrate into those worlds in which the essence of the human being can be recognized – or, as we shall see later, can actually be experienced – they nevertheless lead through thinking. Only it leads to thinking in such a way that this thinking is not accepted as it presents itself in everyday life or in ordinary science, but that it is developed in such a way that, through this development, it basically becomes a completely different kind of soul power than it was before. And basically, all understanding of the study of the supersensible worlds depends on first learning how thinking can become something quite different in the human soul through a certain inner treatment than it is in outer life and in ordinary science.

Now, I have often had the opportunity here to point out the essential thing that has to be done in the treatment of thinking, so that this thinking becomes a completely different soul force than it is from the outset; and so today I do not want to point out again, in principle, what thinking must now accomplish in order to, so to speak, come out of itself and become a completely different soul force. I will only mention a few things that characterize what is actually achieved when thinking is treated in a certain way, purely inwardly, in a soul-like way, so that it becomes something quite different from what it is in the first place. You can find a detailed description of the methods by which thinking can be treated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” You can find it in the second part of my “Occult Science.” Today I want to emphasize only the fact that certain inner activities are indicated that thinking can undertake, but which are purely of a soul nature – a certain way of taking perceptions into one's consciousness and relating to them, taking perceptions, connections and to relate to them and so on - that the soul becomes capable of doing this by interspersing the thinking with something that is unusual for ordinary thinking, that one thereby experiences something within the thinking, I would like to mention this first. And these experiences, which one brings about, are a first step in the exploration of the supersensible worlds. What one experiences precisely by strengthening and inwardly reinforcing one's thinking through meditation – and the types of meditation and concentration are mentioned in the books mentioned – is that one comes to realize that the thinking one applies in ordinary life and in ordinary science is, as it is, unsuitable for exploring the supersensible worlds. One notices, in particular, that when one devotes oneself to this ordinary thinking, one does not, in this thinking, become aware of the forces that can lead into the supersensible worlds. And even more than the mere materialistic theorist, through such mental exercises, through the actual inner experience of thinking, one gains the full conviction that the thinking one does in ordinary life, between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, that this thinking everywhere requires the bodily tool, the bodily organization. And because the bodily organization is necessary for this, because this thinking proceeds in such a way that everything it accomplishes makes use of the bodily tool, this thinking cannot free itself from being within the sensual world, and therefore one cannot enter through this thinking into any other world than the one in which one cannot find the essence of man. And precisely by commanding silence to all outer perception in meditation, by switching off the senses arbitrarily, so to speak, by commanding the inner affects, the inner feeling and sensing to stand still and by devoting oneself purely meditatively, inwardly, to certain thoughts in order to concentrate all soul powers on these thoughts and thereby strengthen thinking, one notices that it is the attachment of thinking to the physical tool that prevents one from entering the supersensible worlds. This is precisely what one attains through meditation: one realizes, one perceives exactly how one makes use of the body in order to think. One becomes, so to speak, more convinced of this through experience than the theoretical materialist can prove through it. One lives with this thinking within the bodily, the physical organization. But one also notices that, by living within the bodily, physical organization, this bodily, this physical organization makes something specific possible that would not be possible without it, that it, this bodily organization, gives thinking something that thinking would not have without this organization – if I may first express this paradoxical sentence. It will already prove true in the further considerations of the evening. Namely, what one notices is that, in the process of thinking, something must remain of the thought in healthy mental life. Everyone knows what must remain. It is the memories. It must be possible that, alongside thinking, something arises in our mental life that we call 'memory'. He who would lose what he thought the moment he thought it would not be an ordinary man for our external physical world. The fact that we can store thoughts in memory is the basis for this. And now, through the inner methodical treatment of thinking in the indicated direction, one notices that one's physical organization is necessary for memories to remain of the thinking. And with that, one also notices that one can, in a certain way, detach thinking from the physical organization. One can only not detach the thinking that becomes memory.

What I have just said leads the spiritual researcher down a very specific path. It leads him to recognize that memory, as we initially have it as human beings, is a force that is only significant for the physical-sensory world, and that this memory must first be detached, so to speak, from the activity of thinking, from the actual process of thinking. I would like to say: Just as the chemist uncovers the secrets of material nature by separating substances from one another in the laboratory, so too must the spiritual researcher proceed with the individual soul processes. Only that his analysis, his spiritual scientific analysis, consists of purely inner soul processes, and the synthesis, the reassembling of what has been separated, is all the more so. Thus it turns out to be necessary to detach in thinking that which leads to ordinary memory, to ordinary recollection, from the actual thinking activity. But how can one do that? This question now arises: how can one, so to speak, treat certain substances physiologically in such a way that substances dissolved in them are made to fall out of them through certain processes, leaving the dissolving substance behind – how can one bring out of thinking that which leads to memory, to recollection, so that something remains? This happens, dear honored attendees, by repeatedly and faithfully repeating it over long periods of time, even if only for very short periods during the day, to dwell on it within thoughts or images, or whatever it is , and that one actually attaches importance to paying attention in the soul, not to remembering it, but to paying attention in the soul to what one is doing, by becoming absorbed in the thinking activity. Then one notices that in this thinking activity something is alive, which one actually always has in one's everyday life and in ordinary scientific research, but which remains unconscious, which does not penetrate into consciousness. I can make myself understood by saying the following: Let us assume that we carry out an external activity that is related to our business, our profession. In doing so, we repeatedly produce this or that. After all, people have to choose a profession that, so to speak, leads them to the same activity every day. In this way, the main thing is taken for granted in our outer life, namely that what can be brought forth through our work is brought forth. The result is the main thing. But in addition to this, something else very often comes along, and we can very well regard it as something important and essential in our outer life, even if it relates to our outer work. By practicing the same occupation every day, we become more and more skillful; our hands, our other actions become more and more alive in us, so that we not only produce the result, but also an increase of activity takes place in us. We may often not pay attention to this increase in activity. But it can be observed.

What I have mentioned here for the outer life, where it naturally has a completely different meaning, must now be transferred by the spiritual researcher to the inner experience of thinking, and indeed of the thinking that he is carrying out in meditation, when he, so to speak, completely immerses himself in it, forgetting his entire surroundings and the actual experiences he has otherwise undergone, when he immerses himself in what can be called meditation or contemplation. And there he will find, if he does not overdo the individual meditations – I will also talk about this later – he will find that if he repeatedly and again and again and intensely pursues such inner thought development, he will learn to observe, not the thoughts, but the activity of thinking. From the increase, he realizes that there is an activity of thinking. And by experiencing, by grasping, so to speak, his own activity of thinking, by strengthening this activity of thinking in order to feel it in such a way that it enters his consciousness, whereas in ordinary life and in ordinary science it remains unconscious, he gradually gets into his soul that which he can now detach from the memory work of thinking. For the continuation of such exercises, as they have been described, they yield a very definite result. They yield that man gradually lives himself into the moments, which he himself can evoke, that man gradually lives himself into a new activity, which thinking now performs, that for this new activity memory actually falls away and only an experiencing in the thinking activity is there. One could describe it as follows: when a person develops his thinking in the way indicated, he experiences it, he experiences his thoughts disappearing, and he lives and moves in the activity of thinking, in the inner activity at first. The strange thing is: once one has grasped this point, where one lives in inner activity, then one notices: for this kind of inner soul activity, what is memory in ordinary life is not there at first. Something else is there. And I would like to point out, by way of comparison, how the whole inner soul life has now been changed out of thinking.

A certain experience of the poet Grillparzer is known from his biography. I do not mention this experience because Grillparzer's capacity for knowledge was from the standpoint that is being advocated here, but because — I would like to say — a beginning of what Grillparzer experienced was present in what — I would like to say — must be artificially brought about in order to effect the investigation of the supersensible being of man. Grillparzer had conceived the whole idea of his “Golden Fleece”. He had thought out the plan, the individual events and how they were connected. In short, he had grasped his drama, The Golden Fleece, in thought, in the life of imagination. The remarkable thing was that he forgot it as he had grasped it in a later period. He could not remember it at all. And lo and behold, one day, when he played the same piano pieces that he had played at the time when he had conceived the idea of the Golden Fleece, the memory came back to him; the whole thing was before his soul again. How did that happen? Well, this indicates to us that through the inner activity, which was the same now as it was earlier, through this inner activity he was led again to look inwardly at the whole content of thought. As I said, this is on the way to what is actually to be considered here – but it is just on the way. This path just has to be followed further.

For that is the peculiar thing that the meditant, the spiritual researcher, comes to, that he, as it were, finds himself dying within himself - but only, of course, at the times when he is engaged in spiritual research. The ordinary memory dies away and, as it were, can arise again and again - not now in memory, but through other activities - the activity in which he has once lived can arise. This activity occurs again and again. And lo and behold, once you have gotten used to it for a while - that is, to separate the activity of thinking from the thoughts that can remain as memories - then you notice that the whole mood of your soul life has changed under the influence of these exercises. You do notice something, though, when you get to a certain point in this development of soul exercises. You do notice something that can, in a certain way, have a disturbing effect on the soul: One notices that one can have experiences that do not leave memories behind, and because they do not leave memories behind, [but] are like flowing and weaving processes of experience, they are, so to speak, real dreams, but dreams that exercise a great deal of control over our inner soul life. And so one notices very soon that one's consciousness has become empty, I would say, and can no longer store memories of what one is immediately thinking, that they arise not through the same thinking activity of remembering, of straining to bring thoughts up, but that one's own experiences come from outside, just as sense objects come from outside. One gets an impression more or less of one's life on earth back to the moment up to which one usually remembers. The thoughts appear like realities. The thoughts appear like something alive. They come to you like living beings; not as they appear in memory, but they come to you like living beings.

In fact, thinking takes on a completely different character under the influence of the exercises. It really becomes a completely different soul power. And I would like to point out, by way of comparison, how surprising this change in thinking activity can be. Imagine that you have a statue, a sculpture, in front of you; it is formed. Imagine that the moment could come when this statue, this sculpture, begins to walk, to live. Then you would initially find something that violates the laws of external nature. Of course, that cannot happen. I only wanted to mention this as a comparison because something occurs in the life of the soul that can indeed be compared to it. In the thoughts that one otherwise has in ordinary life and that lead to memories, one has the impression, in one's own inner experience, that these thoughts must be passive images that depict the external, that they do not, so to speak, live inwardly. And if they led a life of their own, then the life of the soul would express itself through the inner life, through the independent life of thoughts, in fantasy, in dreams, if not in something worse, if not in hallucinations. In the ordinary life of the soul, thoughts really have something that can be compared to the forms that a column has. Of course, nothing should be said against the value of sculpture. That would, of course, be foolish. But in a certain way, what takes place as the logic of thinking in the ordinary activity of thinking can be compared to the dead statue, where we are not aware of the actual activity in thinking, of what connects the thoughts, what brings them together and what separates them again. While the statue cannot merge into activity, into life, the inner logic, the inner weaving and life of thoughts can now merge into consciousness, can become inwardly alive; the statue “logic” can, as it were, become an inner living logical being, which one now feels as if one were living into a completely different world. From this moment on, one knows: That which one first peeled away from memory, that is, thinking activity itself, has become detached from its dependence on the bodily organs. As I said, I will discuss all possible objections from the point of view of science the day after tomorrow. But what the spiritual researcher experiences at this important point in his development of the soul forces is that he now knows: You have detached the thinking activity from the physical-corporal; you have emerged with your soul, insofar as the soul moves in thoughts, from your physical organization; you are no longer in your body.

As paradoxical and strange as it may seem, it is a reality. It is possible - but only through inner experience - to observe this separation of the spiritual soul within us from the physical body. What the spiritual researcher experiences has been described at various times with one word, which has also been mentioned here in earlier lectures, but which may be mentioned again and again because it represents something that has an infinitely shattering effect on the soul when it has arrived at the point of which I have just spoken. Because, indeed, the development that the spiritual researcher undergoes, dear attendees, is such that the individual stages are connected with inner shocks, with inner conquests, of which we must also learn some. This has no objective value. But when one speaks of the paths and methods by which one researches the supersensible entity of man, this must also be mentioned. But now it must be said: in the way I have shown it, spiritual research can actually only arise in our time. All that arises in the ongoing culture of humanity must, after all, occur at a certain time. Just as the newer scientific way of thinking arose three to four centuries ago, as it was made possible by external circumstances, by the inner developmental circumstances of humanity as a whole, so such a treatment of the soul forces as has been described was not possible before our time. This could only come about after centuries of scientific training of humanity, so that thinking in general would acquire the strength within human development to be able to undertake something like this. In earlier centuries and millennia, however, there were always people who, on other soul paths and out of other developmental forces of the soul, also penetrated into the spiritual worlds, on developmental paths that are no longer appropriate only for today's advanced humanity. These paths must be changed, just as the way of looking at nature has also been changed in the course of development. But in their own way, spiritual observers of the most diverse millennia have also come to the point that is meant here, where they were seized by something living in the world, which is, so to speak, a living, weaving power of thought, an objective power of thought that flows and weaves through things. They realized that when the soul comes to this point, it is so moving that they said: “The soul arrives at the gate of death.” And indeed, one knows something about this coming to the gate of death, which, precisely because it comes before one's soul inwardly, has a harrowing effect; one knows: by having pushed the activity of thinking so far that this activity has transformed itself in the indicated way, one enters into such a coming to life of thinking. But one faces an inner - not a physical - danger. Not a danger that has something to do with the [gap in the transcript], but one faces a danger.

One faces the danger of not being able to carry into the world, purely inwardly, the soul, that which is otherwise ordinary everyday self-awareness, into the world that one is now experiencing. One faces the danger of entering a world in the face of which one is powerless, spiritually, purely spiritually powerless, to carry one's self-awareness into it, in which one seems to lose oneself at first, so that one actually comes to stand at the gate of a world, but by standing there, it is as if one had to leave oneself behind. This losing of oneself, this no longer having oneself, that is initially a harrowing experience. And this experience, fully lived through, really experienced inwardly, so that one has it in one's soul, that allows one to experience something else now, that allows one to experience that one knows: Yes, this self-awareness that you have there, this self-awareness that once arose in this life occurred in this life, at the point in time up to which one otherwise remembers back, where one started to call oneself an ego - this self-confidence is in the most eminent sense, even more than the other soul powers, bound to the physical body organization. And now that one has emerged from the physical body organization, one is faced with the danger of no longer being able to say “I” to oneself, of losing oneself. One learns to recognize what is snatched from one when one passes through the portal of death, when the soul-spiritual separates from the physical-bodily in reality through death. One really comes to - I would like to say - experience vividly in theory what death is in the soul-spiritual sense, is objectively.

That is the harrowing experience. And that is why those who knew something about it described this experience as approaching the gate of death. But one must go through the path that has been described to this significant experience. Only when you follow the exercises described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science”, when you go through these exercises in your soul, will you develop the way in which these exercises are formed from the experiences of the soul. Alongside this path, which has just been described, a parallel path develops, which, as it were, runs parallel to it and prevents one from really losing oneself when one's consciousness has reached the threshold of death. So the spiritual researcher, the meditator, has to go through something else so that he does not lose himself at the point in question, but can carry himself into the world that he has now entered. Just as one needed a development of thinking, a separation of thinking, of the power of thinking, of the activity of thinking, from that which leads to memory in thinking, in order to arrive at the point described, so one needs for the other path a very definite development of the activity of the will, of the will, which again is to be achieved through inner soul exercises.

And here it must be said that this development of the will is based on the fact that one now separates something from the will that one has used in ordinary life, something that is connected with it in ordinary life, as it were – if I may use this chemical comparison – something falls out, is separated from ordinary will activity. In our ordinary volitional activity, especially when one observes this volitional activity in a scientific way, then one knows that one never experiences the will in ordinary life, never, even in the most ideal activity, that one never experiences the will in ordinary life and through ordinary consciousness other than in that it is filled with inner emotions, with affects, with what the motives of the will are. They have to be inside, otherwise the will would not work in ordinary life.

Now, in order to be able to complete the other path that runs parallel to the first one, the spiritual researcher has to do such exercises that enable him to separate the will, [that enable him to have the experience of] separating the will from everything that must be connected because motives must live in the will that come from our physical, from our ordinary soul life and so on, to separate the will from everything that makes up the essence and value of this will for ordinary life. Of course, this separation should not be made for ordinary life – otherwise the person would be unsuitable for ordinary life, or perhaps even worse – but only for those moments, for those times when the person wants to explore the spiritual worlds, when he must create the possibility for himself to experience a will that is free from the ordinary will. And there are again exercises that are now applied to the will, so that the will breaks free. You will find this described in the books mentioned.

Above all, these exercises aim – while the thinking exercises aim to strengthen thinking, to put oneself in the place of experienced thoughts, which one moves to the center of consciousness – these will exercises aim to get more and more arbitrariness over switching off the ordinary will activity, to command calm, inner peace of mind over the whole inner soul life. The ordinary life of the soul is traversed by the remnants of the motives of the will, by worries, by all other feelings, in short, by whatever surges as living power from the ordinary life of the soul into the mind. The exercises are aimed at learning to suppress all this at will. And then the spiritual researcher is able to bring about something that otherwise can only be brought about involuntarily in ordinary life.

To describe this, I must refer to something that occurs cyclically in everyday life, that which one always experiences in a twenty-four-hour period if one leads a somewhat regular human life, namely the alternation of waking and sleeping. Today we need not go further into what happens in the human being as the transition from waking to sleeping takes place within him. But everyone already knows this from trivial, from ordinary observation of life, that at first the activity of the senses involuntarily fades away - in a certain sequence that could be described, the description has no particular value here - that then also that which remains at last, the inner feeling of oneself, the inner living through of oneself, that this also fades away. And then the human being remains in a state that can truly be called unconscious in the most eminent sense.

Now the spiritual researcher comes to the conclusion that when a person is asleep in this unconscious state, his soul essence is nevertheless still within it. And he comes to the conclusion that he can learn to bring about a state through a certain development of the will, which on the one hand is similar to the state of sleep and yet on the other hand is so radically different from it that one can say: It is the opposite state of sleep. The development of the will ultimately aims to switch off all sensory activity and to bring about the same thing with sensory activity that is otherwise achieved in deep unconscious sleep; similarly, to bring this about with all thinking activity, with all feeling activity, with everything that lives in the motives of the will, to suppress the whole sensual and ordinary life of the soul through arbitrariness. And then one notices – when one has acquired the powers to achieve this – that one is really able to induce a standstill of physical, organic life in the same way as it would otherwise occur involuntarily in sleep – one does not need to remain unconscious, one does not really enter into sleep, but one experiences this transition in a conscious state. The power that leads one to suppress this organic activity also leads one, at the same time, to raise the soul-spiritual consciousness out of the body by a different path, now as a volitional activity, so that you are now really not unconscious as in sleep outside of your body – I do not need to explain these statements today because nothing depends on them – but you are consciously asleep and know: you are no longer in what lives in you. But consciousness has not disappeared. Consciousness is intact, along with self-awareness, along with the possibility of knowing yourself as an ego.

This state is radically different from that of sleep, because when you are asleep you are unconscious, but now you are fully conscious when you step out of your body, you can see your body as you would otherwise see a table or an external object in front of you. In this way, one consciously leaves the body and knows that one is outside because one observes the body now as an external object, as one can otherwise observe external objects.

This appears self-evident to someone who has not yet received any messages about such things or cannot acquire an understanding of them, as something quite paradoxical and dreamy. Nevertheless, it is a real process, much more real than any process that the soul can otherwise evoke, and through which the soul now comes to bring the experience of itself in the will to full consciousness.

But now, dear readers, you will experience something that, when described, must at first be taken for granted, as if you just wanted to express yourself figuratively, as if you just meant a mere thought, something symbolic, perhaps even something allegorical. But that is not the case; instead, one experiences something quite inwardly real. One experiences that in this will, which is detached from ordinary mental activity but is now conscious, one experiences something that is always within one, but not as something dormant, not as something substantial, but as a spiritual-soul life of consciousness: One experiences a second person within oneself, who is always in every person, but who cannot be brought to light only through ordinary consciousness. Of course, when people in ordinary life say that a person carries a second person within them, they often mean something figurative, something imaginary. That is not meant here, but what is really meant here is that a person comes to realize: You carry a second person within you, a second person who really has consciousness and who watches you in everything you do in ordinary life in terms of will activity. We are never alone. In the depths of our being there is a true being that develops and is a spectator of us, a being that is in constant activity and that we get to know more and more intimately if we continue such exercises as they have been described. Yes, one first gets to know it in such a way that, before one can really get to know it, one has to overcome a harrowing inner soul experience. I have described the other soul experience, which spiritual researchers have called and call reaching the gate of death. But now one reaches a soul experience that can be described by saying: Only now does one experience in a comprehensive way, spiritually and soulfully – and spiritually and soulfully is, of course, meant to include everything – one experiences in a comprehensive way, spiritually and soulfully, what actually exists in the world, permeating and interweaving this world, in pain and suffering. In a sense, one experiences the foundations of the suffering and pain that lives and weaves through the world. Only now do we learn to recognize what mental pain and suffering is. And we have to, because it is only through experiencing this pain, through experiencing this pain that we develop the ability to grasp, to grasp, to experience this inwardly conscious being that sits within us, directly inwardly, spiritually and mentally. One can say: the person who has an open heart, an open mind for that which surrounds him in the world, will feel that which surrounds him in the world in many respects as something beautiful, as something sublime, as the flowering of the world. The one who undergoes what has been described knows that out of the soil of the pain that flows and weaves through the world, the flower of all beauty, all sublimity, all glory in the world arises.

Of course, dear attendees, there could be people who, in their human wisdom, say: Yes, something like that could make you despair of the wise guidance of the world, of the wisdom of God even; because why didn't God arrange it so that the beautiful, the magnificent, the sublime would appear without the basis of pain? Such people raise objections based on human wisdom, without being able to feel and experience the iron necessities of existence in their depths. The one who asks, “Why is there no sublimity, beauty, or bloom in the world without the basis of pain?” is in a similar position to someone who demands of a mathematician that he draw a triangle whose angles do not add up to 180 degrees. There are necessities. These necessities do not contradict the wisdom-filled guidance of the world. Just as the plant's blossom must develop from the root, so everything that is sublime and beautiful in the world must develop from what one now experiences at the bottom of one's soul as suffering. This leads to a deeper understanding of life and the world; this shows us in which basic element of life beauty, sublimity, and wisdom are rooted, and that this could not be there, that the strength to experience it could not be there at all, if the strength were not acquired by growing out of suffering.

But now the question arises: why do we experience suffering at the very moment when we are inwardly experiencing this inner observer, this inner conscious soul being? Why just then? It begins with this – and I would like to describe these things in detail, although this may make me more difficult to understand – it begins with the fact that, through the development of the will, one really experiences inwardly, as if weaving and living in the newly developed will activity, what is there inwardly as a spectator. By experiencing it first, one experiences it as if it were contradicting everything one has otherwise experienced in one's soul life, in this life, since one can think. The person who experiences it in this way has an intensely heightened sense of what it might be like to have done some kind of careful thinking and then to have someone come along who thoroughly refutes that thinking, presenting it as something that cannot stand up. I would say: one feels what emerges from the depths of the will as an experience in a living refutation. At first it is a very strange, very peculiar experience! Precisely that something comes into the life of the soul that begins like the pain of a refutation of one's own soul life, precisely that which begins like that, which is experienced in such a way, gradually becomes such that one really experiences what one can call: one feels oneself in the stream of pain that flows on the mother soil of existence. But then it is precisely this experience of suffering that makes what arises out of the will, I would say, more and more concrete and concrete, more and more essential and essential. And then one experiences what is actually there, what comes out of the will. One gradually learns to understand why it appears in the form of pain, because one learns to understand: You are now actually experiencing that which you otherwise cannot experience in your everyday life in thinking and willing; what underlies it, what has basically developed in the depths of your soul throughout your whole life, what you have now grasped at the stage when you began to become a spiritual researcher. You experience that which is otherwise hidden in the life of the soul, that which remains when everything in the life of the soul that is bound to the instrument of the outer body falls away. One experiences that which passes through the gate of death, that which, when we die, enters into a purely spiritual world, and because that which now enters into a purely spiritual world is initially suited to live in a spiritual environment, which is not adapted to the life that we have developed, which is now in this life, without being adapted to it. That is why it initially appears in a sorrowful form, in the form of suffering and pain. It is something that develops so that it is intended for a different kind of experience. And now we know what is present in the soul that passes through the gateway of death when our body decays, what the soul really possesses as an immortal. One experiences it now, but through inner experience, just as a plant would feel if it could experience how, in its growth, it gradually prepares the forces that then, in the flower, lead to the germ, which, after going through another life, through the soil of the earth or something similar, can develop into a plant of the same kind. One feels a germ of life, a new germ of life within oneself. And just as the germ of the plant develops out of the forces of the plant and can become a new plant, so one experiences now that this germ of life, which one can initially experience embedded in pain, goes through a spiritual world and can become a new human life, a repeated life on earth. One experiences only that, while the plant germ can be destroyed by the outer circumstances that take place in space and time, so that not every plant germ develops into a new plant, that in the spiritual world, which applies when a person has passed through the gate of death, no such obstacles exist, but in what has just been described the spiritual world and must reappear as a new life on earth, must again seek a body to which it adapts, which it forms, in which it joins with that which comes from father and mother, which lies in the hereditary current, which it thoroughly organizes and leads to a new life on earth.

The spiritual researcher, esteemed attendees, comes, by walking the path that I have described, so to speak, to two inner soul elements, to the one soul element where he feels the danger: you can lose yourself; but he also comes to the other soul element, which gives him a consciousness of the otherwise unconscious thinking in him. The consciousness that he is otherwise aware of is in danger of being lost. But with the consciousness that arises out of the stream of will, one can now enter the world, through it one can lead oneself into the world, which one thus experiences. And here it becomes apparent that, while if one were to experience only that which lives in the will as a new human germ of life, one would feel only pain, it becomes apparent that, when one does the exercises in the right way, these pains show themselves to be something that reveals to one the reveals the secrets of the world, but that in reality it happens that one now carries this consciousness at the bottom of one's soul into what one would otherwise feel as an emptiness, in the face of which one would become powerless if one felt it. There it ceases to be painful, there it awakens to such a life as our senses otherwise awaken to when they have matured from their embryonic state and can behold the sensual world.

As the two elements I have described unite, they now become a new sense, what Goethe calls the “eye of the mind” and the “ear of the mind”, but which is now present in reality. The thinking, which has been further developed to the point that has been described, unites as an activity with the new consciousness, and a fully developed spiritual person, who is now completely outside of the physical within the person, experiences the soul within himself, with whom he lives together, and this spiritual person is now inside in the spiritual world. Now, this spiritual person, by being in the spiritual world, receives something that I have already hinted at, which is like a higher level of remembering, not a remembering that arises from thoughts occurring again, but from what is present in the spiritual world coming before one as a living entity. Now, what has been lived through in the time that we have lived through before we united with a physical earthly body, that which has passed between our last death and our last birth - or let's say conception - also appears as a living entity. Experiences of previous earthly lives arise. A higher kind of memory arises. As paradoxical as it seems, it is the kind of memory that can be developed just as truthfully as other abilities are developed in the course of life from the childlike state of mind, which then become effective in the physical life and one day become aware of themselves as a spiritual being within the spiritual world. He experiences himself as a spirit in the spiritual world. And just as he is surrounded by physical beings of the same kind as his physical organization here in the physical world, so he is now in the spiritual world as a spirit man among entities that are of a spiritual nature. Such spiritual beings, which never enter into physical life, which have their task in the spiritual world, such beings, which, like human souls, lead alternately a spiritual life between death and a new birth, or a physical life between birth, or let us say, conception, and death, all this now becomes, I might say, a spiritual-objective world. However, one must not imagine that this spiritual-material world is somehow a mere repetition of the physical world. More precise things in this direction will be discussed the day after tomorrow; today it should only be mentioned that the whole way in which one experiences the spiritual world is different. For example, by am giving an example, I must, of course, since today, to a certain extent, one compromises oneself with truths about the spiritual world, I must compromise myself even more than is already the case with the way of thinking that is customary today. Let us assume that, with regard to the spiritual experience in this person who has developed out of the other person, we are dealing with a soul, with a human soul that passed through the gateway of death years ago. It may well be that in the way the spirit can perceive the spirit, one feels the soul of the dead person taking effect on oneself. But it is not as some might imagine – as I said, this will be discussed the day after tomorrow – it is not as if one were to see a refined material image; it is not as if one were to see a nebulous in the sense in which trivial superstitious clairvoyance believes – but in a completely different way, the spiritual enters our consciousness, which has been born out of the stream of will. And to characterize the way in which the spiritual is now experienced, I have to say something like the following: Let us assume that we, as human souls, have thoughts. The thoughts live in us. Let us assume that the thought could experience itself; then the thought would say: I am in the human soul. The thought would not depict an external world to each other as we do, but it would know itself in a world, it would know that it is in a world. I could also say: instead of looking at it, it experiences being looked at, that it itself is being experienced. That is what it experiences. So being together with the spiritual world is now much more real than being together with sensual things, but in a different way. That which lives in the spiritual worlds enters into our consciousness, so that the consciousness, which we ourselves have only just brought into the spiritual world in the way described, now knows of other consciousnesses that come together with it; the consciousness knows that it is experiencing spiritual beings.

It may therefore happen that a soul from the spiritual world that wants to help or lean towards ours – it can be a human soul, or also any other soul that never embodies itself in a physical body – that this is experienced by us as living in our consciousness. Then you realize that in ordinary life on earth we actually always have the spiritual world living in our consciousness. But because we are not aware of this, our ordinary consciousness does not contain these spiritual beings. However, one can learn to feel when one has to perform a spiritual task, for which one needs inspiration. Such experiences can be had.

It is self-evident – and it is not out of immodesty – that one has personal experiences, personal research experiences, so to speak, to indicate what has been researched. But it has happened, for example, that a soul who died years ago, who had a very special artistic inner ability, carried this artistic inner ability through death and now helped with certain artistic endeavors. The one who has acquired spiritual perception in the manner described knows how to distinguish what is his own, although it could flatter his pride and vanity more to attribute it all to his own genius; he knows what is alive in him and what is coming from the spiritual world and its beings.

And if someone then says – as I said, more will be said about this the day after tomorrow – if someone says, esteemed attendees: Yes, all this can be an illusion, all of it can be a hallucination – then for today the only thing to be said in reply is that there are also certain philosophical schools of thought that say: Everything you see with your eyes is actually only a creature of your eyes themselves. One need only recall Schopenhauer's writing: the world is only an illusion – which was so exaggerated by a man who once stood before Goethe that this man expressed the conviction to Goethe: “If I have not opened my eyes, then the sun is not there!” A more recent naturalist, who is not at all averse to including borderline areas of natural research in his research area, said: Well, yes, but it has been established that the man has long since died and can no longer open his eyes – but the sun is still cavorting around in space.

I myself know what objections can be raised against this; but essentially it is still true. But precisely [gap in the transcript] justifies these philosophical objections. Man learns to grasp what in the real world is real and what is merely imagined, merely experienced in his soul. Just as man can learn to distinguish between what is real in the external world of the senses only through life, so too, with regard to spiritual and psychological experiences – which have developed, as has been described – only one's own soul can justify itself and, if I may use these expressions, perceive entities and events as real. Once you can do that, then all the objections that can be raised are as futile as the objections of the philosophical idealist – in the technical sense, that is meant – against the reality of the external world. In the external world, reality can only be experienced. There is no proof that can be logically derived; only in life itself can one learn to distinguish the real from the dreamed, from the hallucinated. And how the soul life remains healthy and learns to distinguish the hallucinated from the experienced will be discussed the day after tomorrow. This is how one learns to distinguish the dreamed from what is real. And so also in the spiritual world.

So today I wanted to take these considerations only to the point where it shows how man, through an exploration of the spiritual world, can come to the knowledge of his own spiritual being, which belongs to this spiritual world. This particular consideration of the spiritual world, which is based on an inner development of the soul, could only arise in the period of modern science, which, in relation to the education of the soul of humanity, was, so to speak, the preparatory school for it. And it is quite understandable that, having familiarized itself for a while with the very thing that constitutes the greatness of the newer natural scientific way of thinking, humanity has strayed from even considering it possible that the soul can really come to a knowledge of the spiritual world. How every person, even if he is not a spiritual researcher, can absorb knowledge of this spiritual world and recognize its truth, just as one can, without being a chemist, utilize chemical products and chemical truths for ordinary life - I will talk about that the day after tomorrow. And today I will merely point out that it is quite understandable to the spiritual researcher that those who have become immersed in mere external natural science and have become acquainted with the soul forces that are involved in this external natural science, who have learned to use these soul forces and their development into a research method, those who have fully recognized the splendor and the heights and the great successes and achievements of modern natural science, which has brought about all this, [to the spiritual researcher it is quite understandable] that those who have come to know these soul forces could, for a while in the development of humanity, come to believe that there can be no science at all beyond that which is based only on the development of sense perception and of thinking bound to the brain, that is, to the physical organization.

But what can really be experienced, dear honored attendees, testifies that the field of real knowledge can be extended into the spiritual world, that man can truly explore his spiritual-soul being, which goes through births and deaths, in repeated earth lives. And when a brilliant nineteenth-century natural scientist rightly emphasized that the contemplation of those cognitive powers that have brought about success in natural science cannot lead beyond the realm of sense-perceptible nature, but nor can it enter into the reasons for existence – when this brilliant naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, therefore proclaimed his Ignorabimus, therefore his “not knowing” – it was precisely because he had become accustomed to those powers of knowledge that are only able to fully see through and penetrate the outer sensual world. And he said that if one wants to undertake something in order to know something other than outer nature, then, as he says, 'supernaturalism' begins, that is, becoming familiar with the spiritual world. Only, he says, where supernaturalism begins, science ends. He does not yet know – and quite rightly could not know – that those powers of cognition that have just been sharpened and strengthened by observing the external world cannot lead into these spiritual worlds. It is only when these powers of cognition, as we have them, are transformed that thinking and will must develop in a different way than they do in ordinary science. Then they must be enlivened, invigorated, to penetrate into the spiritual world.

And so one must say: There is a certain one-sided correctness to the ignorabimus, to what Du Bois-Reymond says – one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with the powers of knowledge that have made natural science great. But one can develop those powers of cognition, exactly the same powers of cognition, through an inner spiritual-soul method, so that one can then strive up into the spiritual worlds through the thus developed powers of cognition, can penetrate up - [and that is] when knowledge does not remain merely the passive knowledge that contributed to the greatness of external science, but when knowledge becomes a living one - in the transition from the statue to living logic, to inner life - when, so to speak, the soul itself becomes living, living logic, and this logic can be permeated and experienced with what it finds in the current of the will. For that which the spirit is - dear honored attendees, allow me to conclude with these words - can only be experienced by awakening knowledge to life and living as LIVING knowledge in the living spiritual world, by leading life itself, which the human being otherwise leads bound to the sensory and physical organs, by leading life itself to knowledge, to living knowledge! Through knowledge becoming living knowledge, through a new person, an inner person being discovered in the person, the person lives their way up into the world in which they are as a spiritual being among spiritual events and among other spiritual beings; through this they live their way up into the world in which their true origin, their true task, their true meaning lies. More on this the day after tomorrow.