The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being

GA 71b — 18 February 1918, Munich

The Revelations of the Unconscious in the Life of the Soul from the Spiritual-scientific Point of View

Dear attendees, it has recently become common practice in certain circles to speak of the unconscious in relation to the human soul. What was described in the lecture I gave the day before yesterday as spiritual and supersensible is, as I have shown, sensed and longed for by a great many souls at the present time. And since the very prejudices against the study of the supersensible, of which I have spoken, happen, but since one still has an indefinite feeling that there is something beyond the sensual, one speaks in the present time, one speaks more in the negative sense about this beyond and, in contrast to what consciously enters into the human soul life in everyday life, one speaks of that which remains hidden, and also unconscious or the like.

Now, if the history of the development of ideas about the unconscious in recent decades were to be discussed, it would be possible to talk about it for hours alone. But that is not my task today. I will just mention in the introduction that, although a lot has been said about the unconscious by individual personalities in the past, the term “unconscious” was used in a broader sense by Eduard von Hartmann, who is therefore often referred to as the philosopher of the unconscious, to describe what is hidden from the senses and the immediate soul life and is connected with human existence. And perhaps I may point out by way of introduction, and only hint at, that I myself at the time, in the 1880s and early 1890s of the last century, tried to come to terms with Eduard von Hartmann's views on the unconscious in human mental life, on the unconscious in the world in general.

I have reported on those discussions, which [I] also had in personal acquaintance with Eduard von Hartmann, in the second book of the second year of the journal “Das Reich”, which appears here in Munich. Perhaps it is easiest for me to begin by expressing how the spiritual-scientific direction represented here generally relates to the concept of the unconscious if I tie in with the ideas that Eduard von Hartmann had about the unconscious unconscious in human mental life, in nature and in existence in general, because I must first deviate in two respects and have always had to deviate from Eduard von Hartmann's views on this point.

The first is that Eduard von Hartmann points from the sensory, from the soul to an unconscious, to a supernatural, supersensory, but that he was of the opinion that this unconscious could only be reached for human knowledge through logical dissection of what is perceived in nature and in the human soul, that there is no other way to get at this unconscious than in a hypothetical way, by concluding from what one sees and hears and can understand, by concluding from this that there is an unconscious in the world that must always remain an unconscious, a mere hypothetical, in relation to what man can recognize here in his physical body.

In the face of Eduard von Hartmann's opinion, I have always had to put forward the spiritual-scientific one, which consists in the fact that such a hypothetical statement, such a mere logical conclusion about an unconscious, is completely worthless; because ultimately it leads to nothing but to assume that what one deduces so logically could also be otherwise. From the experiences which I permitted myself to describe the day before yesterday and on the basis of which today's consideration is to be built, I always had to conclude from these truly spiritual experiences of the human soul that one can only come to the supersensible through logical thinking, through the hypothetical dissection of the world supernatural, but through direct experience, by bringing the forces slumbering in the soul so vividly into perceptual abilities that one can not only infer the unconscious, but grasp it as such in the same way as one grasps the sensual, the ordinary conscious.

Thus spiritual science penetrates from mere logic to a real vision of the unconscious, the supersensible, for ordinary consciousness. The methods to which the human soul has to submit in order to develop, so to speak, from its foundations, which are unconscious themselves, what one could call... [Gap] I mentioned the day before yesterday the methods by which the human soul can be made to develop out of its unconscious depths what might be called, in Goethean terms, 'spiritual eyes' and 'spiritual ears', 'spiritual organs'. That is one thing: spiritual science, as it is meant here, must relate to the unconscious in a completely different way than any philosophical direction of the present, especially those that are even hypothetically based on the unconscious.

The second point at issue is that Eduard von Hartmann ultimately regards the spiritual element under consideration as unconscious of itself, that is, he believes that although it is possible to arrive at the assumption of a spiritual element behind the sensual existence by means of certain logical conclusions and conditions, one cannot but state, on the basis of the evidence, that it itself is not conscious, that it is unconscious spirit, that consciousness arises from this only when this unconscious spirit embodies itself in the human body and there creates consciousness, which would then be the only consciousness that comes into consideration, and that, in contrast to this, that which lies higher in reality than this consciousness, would be an unconscious. One would then come to see that what man must regard as his actual being of consciousness arises like a wave from an unconscious spiritual life. I believe, esteemed attendees, that it must appear quite unsatisfactory from the outset, although this is of no particular value, if one assumes the spirit but finds it endowed only with unconsciousness, and such a spirit is basically not much more valuable than the unconscious matter. It comes down to the same thing, whether one lets the spirit arise out of unconscious matter or the conscious soul-life out of unconscious spirit; one is always dealing with what I would call a purely natural spirit, with no anchoring of the human soul-spiritual in a related or superordinate soul-spiritual.

But precisely the experience of which I spoke here the day before yesterday, the experience that is based on the life of the soul transformed into spiritual perception, shows that when one penetrates, vividly penetrates, into the world of the spirit , one does not arrive at unconsciousness, but at real beings, which, quite independently of human consciousness, are just as conscious as the human consciousness itself. Indeed, there are degrees of consciousness in the universe that are superordinate to the human.

Dear attendees, today I will undertake the task of giving you a consideration of what borders on the ordinary human soul life in the area that the spiritual science represented here actually designates as the spiritual, as the supersensible; because from such a consideration, I would like to say, many things arise that illustratively lead into an appropriate judgment of what spiritual science has to say about the actual supersensible itself, and besides, it is very close to the present, where so much is said about the unconscious, where one wants to recognize the spiritual precisely in the form of the unconscious, that this spiritual science also speaks about those areas that one would so much like to confuse with the actual area of spiritual science itself.

It happens again and again, despite the fact that for many years I have seized every opportunity here to emphasize the difference between the field to be considered by spiritual science and these border areas. It happens that spiritual science is confused with these border areas. Therefore, it must talk about these border areas. Besides, there is something else. The field of spiritual life, which, when viewed as I described it the day before yesterday, is avoided by very many people today, is seen as a dream, a fantasy, and people prefer to stick to what cannot be achieved through free spiritual knowledge, as spiritual science wants it, rather than through the supersensible, but what is more self-evident. Now the supersensible does indeed flow into the sensory as a revelation; but these revelations of the unconscious supersensible in the sensory can only be judged correctly if one is able to look at them from the point of view of actual spiritual knowledge.

Today I will speak only in spiritual scientific terms about the relevant phenomena, and I hope that it will be understood that not everything can always be said in every single lecture. I may point out that even if I merely discuss these phenomena more or less from a spiritual scientific point of view today, it is understood that what I emphasized the day before yesterday is that what spiritual science tries to recognize is not only not in contradiction to a truly understood scientific result, but that these insights of spiritual science, including those into the unconscious, are confirmed by real, genuine scientific knowledge.

The areas that come into question when talking about the revelations of the unconscious are very broad, and I will only be able to consider, I would like to say, a limited area today, the area that encompasses the interesting, familiar, albeit little researched, disregarded area of field of human dreaming, the world of dreams. I shall also have to consider a field that many people regard as related to the field of dreams, but which is not really so. This field is of great interest to many people today who are seeking the path to the spirit. It is the field of sleepwalking and all related phenomena.

I will then have to point out another area of the subconscious or superconscious that also extends into ordinary human life: it is the area of fantasy creations, poetry, and artistic creation. And I will then have to point to a broad area, even if it can only be briefly considered today: a broad area that approaches man half consciously and half unconsciously, but no less significant for human life, the area we refer to as “human destiny”, in which one might not even believe that so much unconsciousness lives in it. And then I will have to point out the area that is the actual field of spiritual science, which also remains unconscious for ordinary consciousness, but whose revelations shed light on all other areas of the unconscious. I will have to talk about the I will have to speak about the realm of intuitive consciousness, which I would prefer to avoid calling the realm of truly developed seership, although that would be correct.

I will first try to give a brief characterization, without going into any explanations, of how these individual areas, from which the unconscious reveals itself, approach the ordinary human consciousness. No one should hope that spiritual science is willing to look into the realm of dreams as some amateur or superstitious people do. But spiritual science seeks to look into this realm in such a way that it can itself explain and reveal many a mysterious aspect of the life of the human soul. Everyone is familiar with this realm of dreams, with the surging dreams that a person remembers in their waking life and has an inkling that they reveal themselves from an unconscious realm, that they occur like images of memory so that they can be grasped to a certain extent.

But everyone also senses that a person dreams much more than they remember, that the dream life permeates a much larger part of the sleep life than is believed, because a large part of the dreams experienced is actually forgotten. The external characteristics of the dream life are extraordinarily interesting. At first it seems as if the dreams undulate up and down without any inner lawfulness. But one only needs to bring a few categories of dream life to mind and one will see that a certain lawfulness prevails in this dream life, even if it is only superficially observed at first.

First of all, there are what some philosophers have called sensory stimulus dreams. In them one becomes aware that the soul-spiritual life of man stands in a different relationship to the environment than in ordinary consciousness when dreaming. In them one becomes aware that in a certain way - now speaking superficially - the normal sense life is switched off, but not every language that the senses speak inwardly to the soul also ceases. One only needs to think of an example from the realm of sensory-stimulus dreams to see that, although the receptivity of the senses to the external world does not need to cease, the way in which a person otherwise communicates with the world through his senses is not present in these dreams.

You have your watch lying next to you and you dream that you hear, for example, a rider trotting by. In the waking state, you would... [Gap] – By waking up, one realizes that it was the striking of the clock that symbolized itself into the dream. In the waking state, one would have placed oneself in relation to the environment in a normal way through the sense of hearing; in the dream, what is ordinary sensory perception transforms into a symbolic process. In principle, every sense can perceive, and a very dramatic action can be linked to a sensory perception. But you will always notice that the sensory perception in the dream is in some way symbolically, pictorially reinterpreted. An ordinary sensory perception does not live in the dream life.

In the same way, bodily processes can be symbolized in dreams. We dream of a boiling oven, wake up and know that this dream has been caused by an unusually rapid heartbeat. We experience moods of the soul, reminiscences of life, things that may lie far back in the past, coming to life in dreams. We also experience dreaming things that may surprise us greatly. Everyone is familiar with these different categories of dream life. If we want to enter into a characteristic of dream life, as we want to do later, one thing must be particularly clearly noted: it is clear that dreams lack two sides of ordinary human experience.

Anyone who follows the dream life will find that dreams lack what we call the logical course of our ideas in our ordinary conscious daily life. The dream excludes logic. Sometimes one would like to contradict this statement; but the contradiction would not stand up to close observation. A dream can proceed logically; but then the logical course is not brought about by the application of the logical power in the time of dreaming, but rather we dream some event that we have once followed logically in itself. We dream along with the logic, but do not reason. This gives the appearance of being able to dream logically. One can dream the logical as reminiscence; but one cannot realize the logical as the power of logical reasoning.

The other characteristic is that moral standards and moral judgment are absent from our relationship to dream images and also from the genesis of dream images. Everyone knows that in dreams they do things about which their conscience is silent, which they would condemn, would never do if they actually happened in their waking lives. This is significant for the assessment of the world of dreams: logic and moral judgment are actually excluded from dream life. The other thing that is of real importance is that while we dream, we are in the same relationship to our environment as we are in dreamless sleep.

This is very important. In dreamless sleep we experience nothing of what is going on around us through our senses, nor do we experience anything of what is happening in our own body or what else wants to flow out of this body into the soul life. In a sense, we withdraw into the soul life, which initially remains unconscious, in dreamless sleep. If the dream images flow into this dreamless sleep, our relationship to the environment does not change. This is essential. We can speak of sensory stimulus dreams themselves, but what affects us through the senses does not do so through the process that takes place in the senses, but much more inwardly affects the human soul life; it works in such a way that the sensual is already symbolized, that it is already in a certain way spiritually transformed. We do not enter into a relationship with our environment through dreams in the same way as through rational sensory perception, and we do not do so with our own body either. We do not experience the conditions in our body in the same way as we experience them when we are awake; we experience them in a transformed way, in a way that is shaped by the soul. We experience them in a symbolized way or something similar, and that is the essential thing in dream life: that it conjures all kinds of things into consciousness, but that the person always enters into an equally closed relationship with their environment, despite dreaming, as in dreamless sleep.

This is, on the surface, the reason why we are always able to put the dream into the right perspective in its course in our waking day life [and] why we cannot be deceived by the dream into thinking that it has any meaning within our waking day life, that it sets up any unjustified claims in practical life. From this point of view, the very characteristic of a healthy psychic life is that we are not in a position to place the dream in the wrong context in our waking daily life. While the dream itself does not reason or moralize, we are always able to fully establish the logical and moral relationship of the dream itself to our waking daily life.

This is what distinguishes the dream in relation to its relationship to waking life from all personal experiences that one can now have with the second kind of unconscious, with the somnambulistic phenomena and all that goes with it, the hypnotic phenomena, the phenomena of mediumship and so on, and so on. This area is one that is of particular interest to the present day, because it is believed that in the abnormal phenomena that come to light, a gateway can be found out of the ordinary life of the senses, a place where something unknown can be glimpsed and revealed in the ordinary life of the soul.

And so it happens that people who are not only to be taken seriously as scientific and other researchers believe that one can approach the true spiritual through research in this field, or also that true researchers - sometimes great researchers in their field - because they also have the general yearning, they judge wrongly that which can be summarized in the wide field of somnambulant phenomena, and believe that by observing these somnambulant phenomena they can really approach a spiritual life in the beyond.

Now, in the realm of somnambulism and related phenomena – and I am mentioning everything related here – one has to distinguish between everything that arises in a visionary, hallucinatory way from the inner life of the soul, so that one can judge: it arises from the inner life of the soul. Even Eduard von Hartmann was unable to distinguish the image that appears in a dream from that which, for example, is a hallucination. And so he says that every dream image has something of a hallucination. But there is a fundamental difference between a dream image and a hallucination: the person, in their waking consciousness, has full control over the dream image, and is always able to integrate it correctly into the ordinary course of their waking daily life. A hallucination, on the other hand, takes away the ability to relate to it objectively. It takes control of the person's consciousness. The same applies to a vision. And the fact that they occur simultaneously means that something is taken from the person of that power which makes it possible to integrate what arises in the right way into waking day life. ... [space] The illusory character of dreams.

But this is the essence of hallucination: logic is silent, the hallucinating person combines the matter with the waking day life and is not able, by succumbing to the hallucination, to place what occurs in the hallucination in the right way into the course of the waking day life. We speak of another form of somnambulism when a person is able not only to have hallucinations and visions arising from within himself, but when he changes his sensory life in a certain way so that things become perceptible to him through this sensory life, by analogy with this sensory life, that would otherwise not be perceptible.

One may think of these phenomena as one wills – I do not want to go into a discussion of principle of these phenomena, nor into the question of whether one is justified in ascribing a scientific character to what is accepted in this field in the broadest circles. What matters to me is to show you how, regardless of the objective justification, respected researchers want to gain insight into the supernatural world through this field! It may be said that, however one may feel about these things, there are people who are to be taken very seriously indeed, who are clear about the fact that certain people have the ability to perceive things in their environment that are not perceived through ordinary sensory activity, in the broad field of “remote viewing” and thought transfer.

All this is well known today. They belong here, and I will show by a particular example how a researcher who is to be taken seriously in the highest sense believed that it was precisely through the development of human personalities, I might say to a refined sensuality, to an increased sensuality, that he could approach the other world, the unconscious, the supersensible. Rarely has anything in this field caused such a stir as the fact that Sir Oliver Lodge, who is known throughout the world as a natural scientist to be taken very seriously, has written a thick book about a field that must certainly be counted among the somnambulant phenomena by the spiritual science represented here, but which he has taken as a way to enter the supersensible world. Without committing myself to an explanation, I will first describe what happened to Sir Oliver Lodge.

Oliver Lodge's son fell at the French front during the course of this war. The remarkable thing was – and Sir Oliver Lodge describes all of this and everything related to it in his book in such a way that one gets the impression from every page: Here a person is describing with the conscientiousness of a scientific method. He draws on everything that somehow demands scientific caution. The strange thing was that even before his son fell, Sir Oliver Lodge received a message from the Americans that a medium had said that a long-dead friend of Sir Oliver Lodge would take care of him during an event that would befall Sir Oliver Lodge's son. At first, this was a very vague message, because, of course, it could be interpreted in any direction. One could say: Sir Oliver Lodge's son had gone to war. Anyone can fall there, and any friendly, superstitious side can now send a message that is as vague as possible to Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge could have interpreted this to mean that his son's life was in danger and that a deceased friend from the supernatural world would protect his son.

The other interpretation could have been that the son would fall and that the friend who had already preceded him in death years before would take care of him in the supersensible world. It happens all too often that such preliminary communications in this area are left as vague as possible. People are gullible; they are very inclined not to consider whether what is said fits whether the event happens in this or that way. But the son has fallen. The only possible interpretation was that the message was that Sir Oliver Lodge's friend in the other world would take care of the son.

Now all sorts of things were dragged to Sir Oliver Lodge - but he proved them in a truly scientific sense - all sorts of so-called trustworthy somnambulant mediums were dragged in, and many things came out of it, from which Sir Oliver Lodge, despite his scientific mind and conscientiousness, believed he recognized that his deceased son was speaking through the revelations of the mediums, and through him his protective friend. I will not present what Sir Oliver Lodge describes in the thick book, except for one thing, which can be understood in a way that is otherwise referred to as a cross experiment, which really approached people in such a way that it caused a tremendous sensation. One might say that skeptical people were actually led to believe by these things: Something from the beyond, from the soul that has passed through death, must resonate with the Father, with the whole family, wanting to speak through the mediums.

This experiment consisted of a medium describing a photograph taken by the son of Sir Oliver Lodges before he was killed. He had himself photographed with a number of comrades. The medium stated that it was said through her that this photograph was taken. The individual comrades were described in the seating arrangement, and it was said: several pictures were taken of this group. The seating arrangement was changed a little; but in one shot, it was said: the way the son places his hand on his neighbor's shoulder is different from the hand position in the other shot. Now the strange thing was that exactly this photograph was described by the medium. The other strange thing was that, scientifically speaking, no one – neither the medium nor any of the participants – could have known anything about this photograph, because it had not yet been sent from France to England and did not arrive in England until at least a fortnight later. No one could have known anything about it, yet it turned out that the medium's description was absolutely correct in the most remarkable way.

It is perhaps extremely seductive for a scientifically minded person, and it caused the utmost sensation, as mentioned, making even the most skeptical people think. Because people said to themselves: No one could have known anything. There could be no question of thought transference. It could only have come from the soul of Sir Oliver Lodge's son himself. This was an experience that happened not to a gullible spiritualist but to a conscientious naturalist, and it led him to fully acknowledge that the experiment had provided proof that his son's soul had revealed itself from the unconscious into the conscious. We will discuss Sir Oliver Lodge's error later.

I give this example because it belongs to those experiences in which something is perceived that otherwise cannot be perceived from the environment of the external world, through a modification of the sense life. This area includes everything that consists of the fact that what otherwise cannot be known through the senses and the processing of sensory impressions in space and time can be known by the human being. It includes everything that involves looking into such distances that cannot be seen with ordinary eyes, which includes predicting future phenomena and the like.

The third area that comes into consideration when speaking of the revelations of the unconscious is, of course, the area of artistic creation, and everyone is fully justified in being convinced that in the case of poetic, truly poetic or artistic creation, certain impulses from the unconscious or subconscious reveal themselves in the conscious, that what the true artist brings about cannot be explained in its entirety if one only considers what takes place in ordinary consciousness. That is why all those who have given it reasonable thought have come to the conclusion that in artistic creation, another world flows into the world of consciousness, a world that is unconscious to the ordinary world of consciousness. I do not need to characterize this area in detail, not because it is unknown and little observed, but because it is so obvious and so understandable to everyone that the unconscious reveals itself in this area.

A special area where, as already mentioned, one could deny the character of the unconscious, where the conscious and unconscious play together, can be understood as the area of human destiny. We face the guidance of our destiny in such a way that the individual events of this human destiny come about for most people in such a way that they say: Well, one thing and another happens to us. Most people are convinced that what occurs in their lives as fate is more or less due to chance, that it is a series of chance events, and that there is no inner, lawful sequence in the course of this fate.

However, this is contradicted by something else, which may only come to our consciousness in a vague and hazy way, but all too clearly nonetheless. Let us consider the relationship between our destiny and what we actually are in the concrete human life. If, at some point, we examine ourselves with even a modicum of clarity and not get stuck in abstractions, but look concretely at what we actually are, what we are capable of conceiving and giving these conceptions in terms of emotional coloration, and summoning up in terms of will energies, we will find that this actually emerges from our destiny. We look at the course of our destiny and, with clear self-observation, we know: we are a result of this destiny and we would have to deny ourselves if we wanted to deny the identity of our destiny with our soul life. We are nothing other than what fate has made of us, and if we do not want to acknowledge that we are nothing more than a play of forces, then the question of human destiny becomes a mystery.

The answer to the question: Is fate really just a series of coincidences? - depends on the other, how we are able to place ourselves in the whole world context. But from this, at least the suspicion arises in every reasonably sensible soul that in what we consciously experience and what seems to affect us more or less randomly in our destiny, that something prevails in it that remains unconscious for ordinary experience, but what can be brought into consciousness and proves to be something quite different than what occurs in ordinary consciousness.

And finally: the last area is the area of spiritual science, as it is meant here, itself, the area of the actual seeing consciousness, of which I said the day before yesterday that it can be observed in such a way that in it the human being feels as spirit in spirit, just as he feels here in the sense world as a body within the sensual beings and their appearances. The area of which I have said, that man enters when he, through the development of the otherwise hidden powers of his soul, comes to know: I stand with my I in the spirit, while otherwise I only stand in the body; I experience soul-life by separating myself from my bodily life and unfolding a self-conscious soul-life outside the body.

The phenomena and experiences that occur before this actual vision, which can only be called that, must be characterized in more detail, and before I describe the other borderlands, I would like to characterize this area of true vision first, because this is necessary for a better understanding of the other areas. What a person experiences as spiritual experience, as I said the day before yesterday, differs from experiences within the sensory world in that it actually surprises in every detail. One cannot gain any kind of judgment about what one experiences visually through what one has experienced in the sensory world. It always turns out differently than one might expect from what one is able to observe from the sensory world.

But the very way in which the spiritual world appears before one is able to perceive it visually is different from the behavior of the soul in ordinary consciousness. In our ordinary consciousness, we deal with our ideas and concepts. When speaking about the spiritual world, one must also express in concepts and ideas what can be observed. It can easily happen that one confuses ideas and concepts with the actual spiritual experiences that one encounters through the visionary consciousness.

Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference. We can remember ordinary perceptions, what we experience emotionally in and with the external sense world, in the ordinary sense of the word; but that is precisely a fundamental characteristic of truly experienced spiritual reality: just as it confronts us as spiritual, it cannot be remembered in the ordinary way. One could only believe that one had indulged in a fantastic imagination, that one had experienced something as a reminiscence of life, if one did not know the difference between a reminiscible conception and the non-reminiscible, seen, truly spiritual event. A truly spiritual event is not memorable.

One must not look at such a thing wrongly. Of course one can object: Then no one could speak of such an event; if he did not remember it, he would not be able to communicate it. Yes, just as we can transform an external sense experience into a concept that can then be remembered, so can someone who has trained for this purpose also bring a spiritual experience into the ordinary consciousness and transform it into a concept. The concept can then be remembered. But a concept is being remembered. I want to reject the objection that what is described as spiritual events is only something imagined. It is not, because if it were imagined, it would have to be memorable as such without having to be transformed first; but just as little as the sensual objectivity itself goes with us, so little does the spiritual experience go with us.

When I have seen a tree and walk away, I can again actualize the mental image of the tree in my mind, I can remember by awakening the mental image within me, if I have already awakened it when seeing the tree. If I want to experience the tree again, I have to go back to it. It is the same with spiritual experiences. These do not accompany me on my journey through the soul's life, but only what I have imagined can I remember as an image. Only when one is aware of this can one distinguish between what one has experienced and what one has merely formed as an image.

Another important difference between the visionary experience and ordinary life is that in life, through what one does, one acquires habits. What we have done often becomes a habit. If humans were not given this ability to acquire skills by repeating things over and over again, what would this human life actually be without it?

It is strangely different when, through the exercises I described the day before yesterday, one comes to have spiritual experiences. It turns out that the more often one tries to bring about this spiritual experience, the less one is skilled at having this spiritual experience. I emphasize that this is important. The seer cannot recall the spiritual experience by mere memory; he can only evoke the idea. If he wants to face the spiritual experience a second time, he has to go through the same exercises and create the same conditions so that the spiritual arises as spiritual perception. But when you do this again and again, you experience that it becomes weaker and weaker.

The fact that one cannot acquire something habitual, but that something completely different is necessary to bring about the repetition of the spiritual event, is an experience made by very many who really embark on the path to the spiritual world. It is relatively easy to take a few steps into the spiritual world if one has patience and persistence; however, further steps are as difficult to achieve as I described the day before yesterday. But the first steps are not at all difficult for specially gifted people, and the first experiences come if one pays attention to some of what I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” or in my “Occult Science”.

But such people who have taken the first steps experience that they have had the experiences once, and because they then do not apply the much stronger will, they are no longer able to come to these spiritual experiences, are then very unhappy, are disappointed. This is an experience that many people have. It is absolutely necessary not only to acquire the ability to have such experiences in the first place, but also to have the modified ability to attain them again and again after the event has occurred. Each time you want to attain it, you have new difficulties; each time you have to do more emphasized, different preparations if you want to face the spiritual with the same vividness as the first time.

A third thing that one experiences as a characteristic of the spiritual event is that it is necessary to have a certain quality of soul towards the spiritual experience. This can be cultivated in ordinary life, but very often people have not developed it. A spiritual experience, however strange it may sound, does not actually last very long compared to an ordinary event; it passes by so quickly that usually the situation is that the person has barely mustered the strength to observe the event before it is already over. The thing one must summon in order to have spiritual experiences is presence of mind. This can be trained in ordinary life; but very few people train it to the strength necessary to have experiences in the spiritual world. Those who are accustomed to brooding in their ordinary lives when they want to do something, who consider all sorts of things before making a decision, who are not accustomed to making instinctive decisions and exercising their will to stick to them, who do not train themselves to make such decisions in the presence of a situation, prepare themselves poorly for real experiences in the spiritual world.

On the other hand, what one brings into the spiritual world is what one has already trained in the ordinary world as presence of mind. One can say: the training of presence of mind in relation to sensory events prepares one well to observe as quickly as is necessary in the spiritual realm, and one can truly say: the ordinary reflection of everyday consciousness is of little use to oneself, through the power that is inherent in it, for the perception of the spiritual world. This ordinary reflection, which interposes itself between perception and action, is more harmful than useful for the perception of the spiritual.

The perception of the spiritual in the spiritual realm is similar to what is called a reflex action in natural science. When a fly flies towards my eye, I close my eyelid. In such an instinctive way, in such an exclusion of the usual conscious consideration, in such a return to reflex actions, much of what we need to look around us in the right way in the spiritual world lies. This does not mean, of course, that we should somehow shut out rational consciousness; but it is only after the spiritual perception has been made that what one has experienced can be brought into consciousness.

I could cite many more such peculiarities of the perception of the spiritual world. In such perceptions, in such perceptions that are already completely different from those of ordinary sensory consciousness, the one who knows himself as a spirit lives within the spiritual world that surrounds him, who knows that he as a spirit has self-awareness and that the world that surrounds him is the spiritual world, which he would never have been able to perceive within the body. These things are so.

Now, only someone who has really come to know the spiritual world through such developed vision is able to compare what he is able to observe in the spiritual world with what occurs in the characterized border areas. By mere philosophizing about dreams, however developed the power of judgment may be, one can never really know how dreams enter into ordinary personal life. One is unable to compare the dream that penetrates into ordinary consciousness with anything else; one can only describe it, and everything that natural science has to say about it is very useful, very valuable; but the actual significance of the dream in life can only be grasped by the one who is able to compare the dream with what he gets to know in the seership as the character of the spiritual world. And there he learns in relation to the dream that the dreamer, that is, the actual dreaming being in man, is no different from the one in which the mind consciously knows itself when it is in the spiritual world.

With ordinary consciousness, one cannot judge whether it is the body or the soul that is actually dreaming. Only when one knows how one stands in the spiritual world, when one consciously grasps the self in spirituality, only then can one compare what one observes in oneself and in one's existence in the spiritual world with what occurs in dreams. And then, through direct observation, through direct spiritual insight, one can know: There is nothing else in us that dreams but what is also there when one has developed in fully conscious vision. Thus, through direct observation, one comes to the - if I may express myself pedantically - actual subject of the dream.

But one can learn even more. The one who gradually enters the spiritual world finds that his dream life gradually changes, that he no longer needs to let his dreams wash over him in such a helpless way, but that he can intervene within the course of the dream with his will, directing and guiding the dream images. It is evident, then, once again through direct observation, that what is gradually attained as the spiritual ego is itself the one that intervenes in the dream in a directing and orienting way. It is precisely through this change in dream life, through this observation of oneself becoming a spirit intervening in the dream, that one can see how the actual dreaming is nothing other than what one grasps when one is actually in the spiritual world.

And yet another aspect arises. You are aware that among the many endeavors that are now unfolding in relation to the unconscious, there is one that seeks to approach the spiritual world of man, which is called analytical psychology. This psychoanalysis, which is an exploration of a certain area of the soul, albeit with inadequate means, does not lead to an understanding of the true character of the areas under consideration. This psychoanalysis also works with the dream images of the human being. The psychoanalyst seeks to unravel the dreams and what they reveal about some hidden aspects of the soul life.

Now it is very strange that when I recently discussed the relationship of spiritual science to this method, I was reproached by several psychoanalysts. They claim that psychoanalysis is the true science, it only takes the dream in so far as it is symbolic, whereas I maintain that one ascends to the imaginations and intuitions, and I treat the dream in such a way that I grasp it in its reality. I make the mistake of taking the dream seriously, taking its imagery seriously, while psychoanalysis sees the symbolic character of dreams.

Well, one can be amazed at how misunderstood one is. What I represent as spiritual science adheres neither to the actual course of the dream nor to the symbolism to which psychoanalysis adheres. In fact, it does not adhere to content at all. The one who studies the world of dreams as a spiritual researcher comes to the following conclusion: You see, it can happen that ten people tell you about a dream, and if you are familiar with such things, you can be clear about the fact that these ten have dreamed very different things in terms of the dream sequence, but that exactly the same thing underlies the dream sequence in all ten as a spiritual reality. What matters is neither the symbolism nor the reality of what takes place in the dream, but it is clear to the spiritual researcher that what matters is the inner drama of the dream.

It may be that someone has unconsciously experienced an event in the spiritual realm. It also remains unconscious to him in relation to the dream. The event took place, taking place in the relationship of the human being as a spirit to the spiritual world. But what now occurs as a dream is an external transformation, in that what remains completely in the subconscious is used, what the person has as a sensory stimulus and so on. That is the garment that the dream drama is clothed in. That is the imagery. One can experience something that causes such tension, and this is released by confronting a spiritual event. One person may experience this by climbing a mountain and encountering an obstacle; another by being led to a door, into a labyrinth; a third person may experience the same event in a different way. What matters is not what the dream images say one after the other, but the inner drama, what lives behind the dream without images. This is a spiritual reality, and the spiritual researcher investigates what lies behind it by looking into the real spiritual.

Dreams themselves arise from the fact that what a person experiences in the purely spiritual realm is transposed into a somewhat irregular union of the eternal spiritual self with the physical body. I must assume that the real spiritual knowledge, that is, the possibility of observing human self-awareness as a spiritual being, shows people through direct observation that we are in sleep and dreamless sleep, not when falling asleep and waking up, but that we , albeit with a subdued consciousness, that we are outside our body in this sleep, that we really leave our body when we fall asleep and move back into it when we wake up, and that what moves out and moves in is a spiritual being. Vision consists in nothing other than that which otherwise remains unconscious in sleep is now raised to consciousness in the spiritual world. The dream arises from the fact that what is otherwise fully separated in the spirit, that which comes into a partially irregular connection with the bodily, arises from the fact that it comes into relation with the bodily, that it sinks into the bodily, but not so that it fills the full body, arises from the fact that that it partially sinks in, that the compulsion arises to clothe that which remains behind from becoming aware of processes in the spiritual world in that which one of the corners of corporeality gives, without one having already moved into the whole corporeality.

And so it is always a kind of darkening in the dream of what is truly eternal in man, of that which passes through birth and death, of that which, free of the body, prepares for what follows death, and also develops between birth and death in a germinal way for the next spiritual life. It is a darkening of this soul life, it is a clouding of the soul life caused by the incomplete approach to the body. Only if the human being were incapable of accomplishing what, in a healthy development of his being, he must always accomplish, of fully absorbing and thus appropriating what is attained through the body for the ordinary sense life, of controlling his involvement in the sense life, only if this did not occur would the dream life intrude into human life as something pathological!

Something else becomes apparent when one considers the boundary of the dream life in relation to the world of seeing. The one who develops the gift of second sight learns to understand through the kind of experiences he has in the spiritual world, that he experiences them separately from the body, and learns to understand that this life between birth and death, this life in the sense world, the life in the physical body, must not be seen as a life in captivity. Spiritual science never leads to false asceticism. The student comes to recognize that, in the wise ordering of the universe, the sojourn in the sense body has its good meaning. The entire life of man, which flows between forms of existence in and out of the body between death and new birth, this entire life of man takes on different things.

The power to develop in oneself those impulses that contain logic and morality, this power the person must acquire here in his sensual body, in addition to everything else he receives from the universe, if he wants to acquire it at all. This, to think logically, could not be acquired in the spiritual world, for that we must embody ourselves. Then, through the gate of death, we carry those impulses, which can only be developed on earth, into the supersensible realm.

Now because the dream consists in the fact that one actually carries a spiritual experience into the physical world through the incomplete merging with the body – I cannot go into the details – but because the human being emerges from the spiritual world as a personality, he brings into the physical world from the spiritual world something that is both unlogical and amoral, which can only enter into the content of the dream. That is why the dream appears without any logical or moralizing. Only the seer can compare this peculiarity of the dream, how it relates to morality and logic. Thus I have indicated the possibility of comparing the dream life with what man can know as the content of the spiritual world. But this reveals that the dream is... gap); only the peculiar thing is that in the dream man does not face the eternal. His eternal is active, but what fills this eternal is what comes from the body. In dreams, the eternal in man is directed towards the temporal. But the fact that the eternal is present in these events is shown by a truly spiritual scientific consideration of the dream.

The situation is different when it comes to hallucinatory, somnambulant life. Here we are dealing with the fact that the human being also enters his physical body from the spiritual, that spiritual influences it, but that the spiritual enters the physical either because the inner physical life is in some way diseased, so that the spiritual enters a diseased physical body. Now, the human being can only develop a correct relationship if he immerses himself in the bodily world, which functions as a unified whole. If he submerges himself in such a way that no part of his physical body can fully participate in the development of sensory perception, then, through the elimination of a physical element, a spiritual element arises in part.

We would not see this spiritual if we did not see when our body was somehow diseased. By the fact that it is, the spiritual asserts itself. The spiritual researcher sees the spiritual by standing in the spiritual; the hallucinator sees a spiritual in a diseased, impossible way, actually, by partially switching off his normal physical for sensory perception. But this also means that the occurrence of a spiritual vision that we have no control over is always a sign of some kind of physical illness. One can say: It is understandable that people believe, that even researchers believe, that a real spiritual being is encountered in such a pathological physical condition; but it is to be rejected to do anything that leads to the illness of the physical body for the sake of a spiritual vision. The path that leads to the forced vision is to be rejected from the spiritual-scientific point of view, because it would be a promoter of the human organism becoming ill. And anyone who so misjudges the spiritual scientific methods, as they are described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” as if these methods could somehow seduce one to cultivate that which they specifically condemn, defames these spiritual scientific methods. They are defamed in the broadest sense.

But it can also happen that, to a certain extent, the sick body infects the senses, so that the senses come into a different relationship – I can only mention this in general terms – that the senses come into a different relationship to the usual environment. In everyday life, you perceive your surroundings as you know them. It may happen that through the change in the life of the senses, what is perceived in the environment is what otherwise eludes the senses. It will be what is not accessible to man through the higher spiritual life. But I will explain right away, perhaps better than by generalizing, what I mean by the example from before, by way of an example of what I mean by a somnambular life, by a refined sense life. What is otherwise understood as second sight falls under this category; I must say: it is remarkable, although Sir Oliver Lodge's book has a thoroughly scientific character, that a certain hidden dilettantism can generally be found in this book in particular. The phenomenon, which is presented as a cross experiment, is in fact nothing other than what anyone familiar with this field knows as a refinement of the sense life, so that this sense life is able to perceive things other than what is usually associated with it. If someone whose sensory life and sensory life interwoven with the intellectual life is such that the intellectual apparatus extends down into the senses, if someone has developed such a sensory life, it may happen that today he has the idea: I will ride in a fortnight and have an accident. That can happen. These things are known.

Something that cannot be perceived through the ordinary temporal connection can be perceived by a person simply through an especially abnormal sense of life that has been infected from within. There are cases in which what is seen or suspected occurs with such inevitable necessity that precautions are taken and yet it happens anyway. Now, for someone who is familiar with such things, there is nothing different about somnambulism and the like than there is about a remote vision. What did the medium actually communicate in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge? Well, about a fortnight after the seance, the photograph arrived in the same room. Two weeks later, this photograph could be described with normal consciousness. Through a remote vision, the medium described what arrived later. The somnambulant medium perceived nothing from the hereafter, saw nothing but what later became an event, and the whole crucifixion experiment is objectively, in the facts, correct; the explanation is completely incorrect.

What is at issue is that one realizes that through a somnambulant human life, one can see differently than in normal sensory and mental life, but that in this way the human being is, so to speak, more intimately united with the external world. However, a real insight into the supersensible world of the senses, which man enters after death, in which man is always in touch with the Eternal, is not possible through such abnormal states of consciousness, but only when man really enters this spiritual world in full consciousness, so that he stands as a spirit in the spiritual world and can distinguish between what he can perceive through his corporeality. Wherever there is no real looking in, wherever the spiritual mixes with the bodily itself.

Somnambulism also has its dangers, if only because the soul is switched off – for the soul is switched off and remains switched off during the dream – because the person with the spiritual and soul is completely immersed in the body, a part is switched off, and then the person becomes an automaton. This can be interesting, but must not be cultivated, because only by making the right connections between the spiritual and the physical in the proper way does a person place himself in the right way in relation to the logical and moral world. When the spiritual world has an effect in an abnormal way, this effect, in which always excludes a part of the body, can lead to an incorrect relationship between the personality of the medium and the moral and logical, to moral decline, and to the interweaving of all kinds of lies in a cognitive way, and so on, and so on. We can conclude from the fact that man actually turns himself into an automaton in the artificially induced somnambulistic state that it must not be artificially induced.

Thus, spiritual science shows especially for this area how much man has to pay attention to the fact that these border areas can indeed be illuminated by spiritual science, but that, conversely, they cannot be used to enlighten spiritual life. Then spiritual science shows further that what flows out of the unconscious or subconscious into the human imaginative life actually has the eternal in human nature as its actual subject; only in both the dream life and in the somnambulist is the spiritual inclined towards the bodily.

In the artist, the spiritual-soul is inclined towards the spiritual. While it is inclined towards it, it remains in the unconscious. Then it enters in a proper way, so that the whole physical is taken up. While in sober consciousness such things are forgotten by the spiritual, in the artist the spiritual is carried in, but in such a way that it is not absorbed by a part of the physical, as in somnambulism, and thus weakened, but is brought into the right relationship to the ordinary course of life. Thus, in artistic creation, the eternal is unconsciously inclined towards the spiritual; the eternal towards the eternal. But because the human being is not consciously aware of what he experiences in the eternal, he brings it into the ordinary consciousness and transforms it, and thus it will take on an individual character.

This is the spatial difference between what is artistically created and what the seer, who is immersed in the spiritual world, has before him. The seer has something impersonal before him; he has something around him that has just as little to do with his individuality and just as much to do with it, namely, seeing from a point of view like the external sensory world. The one who perceives unconsciously what the seer sees in the spiritual world with an immediate part of consciousness and brings it into the ordinary world becomes an artist, a poet. That is why people have the well-founded opinion that true artists bring messages of the eternal into the sensual world, that the supersensible reveals itself out of the unconscious through true art into the sensual, into the life of ordinary consciousness.

Then, as I have indicated, the human being experiences his destiny in a peculiar way, consciously and unconsciously. Through what Scher experiences, something is now raised from the unconscious into the conscious that would otherwise always remain unconscious. In ordinary life, we are actually only fully aware of one part of our being, namely our perceptions and ideas. You can see this for yourself from a scientific description such as that of Theodor Ziehen. In contrast, what is called the emotional and will life remains down in the half or completely unconscious. What does the human being know in his ordinary consciousness that only takes place when he moves his hand! Theodor Zichen characterizes correctly when he says: We only have the ideas of what is taking place. That which mysteriously vibrates into the hand as we raise it is as unconscious to us as the events in sleep in ordinary waking day life. The whole real essence of the life of the will, which indeed rules in us, which permeates our eternal being, nevertheless remains unconscious, becomes conscious only through the representations of the arising ordinary consciousness, just as a dream becomes conscious out of sleep in ordinary consciousness; but what we know of the will is not what goes on in the will itself. What we know is as much as we know of a dream when we are awake.

Our emotional life, in which we are equally immersed, is not as unconscious as a dream. It is partly conscious and partly unconscious. The great esthete Vischer already suspected that the emotional life is related to the soul in the same way as the dream life. While the dream life unfolds in images, the emotional life unfolds in feelings, but these feelings arise from the subconscious. We form ideas about them, but we do not get closer to the reality of these feelings than we do to the reality of the dream in the dream, which has its subjective origin in the eternal of the human ego.

Thus, a person is only really aware of half of their waking day-to-day life; the other half remains subconscious. The seer brings it up. He perceives, not only through ordinary conceptions, what lives essentially in feeling and will, but he also forms, through the senses, what he sees in them. But then this experience is a very peculiar one, one that does not arise as it does in dreams or in the recollection of ordinary life, when the shearer follows his feelings - it is a human life or several human lives that arise before his soul; but it is not the life that he can follow when he looks back to birth; it becomes clear to him that past earthly lives play into this earthly life.

At the moment when the light of knowledge flashes through will and feeling, impulses of feeling and will from previous earthly lives make their impact felt. And what germinates in us for subsequent earthly lives flashes again in our life of will. However paradoxical it may sound, it is true that when one does not merely speak hypothetically about the will, as Schopenhauer did, but rises to an intuition of the essential nature of the will and feeling, then the repeated earthly lives become a fact within human consciousness; but then we learn to recognize how, through earlier earthly lives, we ourselves bring about, as it were, what happens to us from the outside. What we have experienced in the past forges the paths within us that lead us to our destiny. The individual earthly lives illuminate each other. What we experience as fate, half-dreamed, half-consciously, like a dream, and what befalls us as chance, all this is illuminated for us when what is unconscious reveals itself.

Talking about previous lives on earth and the lives we live in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is something that still seems as paradoxical to people today as it did in the days when people believed that the earth stood still and the sun and planets revolved around it. The reversal of this entire world view will take time. For a long time people did not want to believe it. For centuries there have been people who have regarded it as impossible; and of course there will also be people today who will receive such things, which occur in such a way, with scorn.

That may be. That is as self-evident as can be; but these things are, so to speak, at the gates of our cultural development. They are what can really illuminate the much sought-after field of revelations of the unconscious. The unconscious is a broad field. It also rests within the sensory world itself. By believing that it is not within this sensory world, one falls back on all sorts of methods to explain this sensory world from something other than the spiritual.

We can see how something like the Kant-Laplace theory comes about. I have often mentioned this before and will only refer to it today because it sheds light on our present-day field. Whether he is an astronomer or a geologist, man tries to guess from what is happening before his senses at the present time, from a calculation, what happened millions of years ago. One can do this without making the slightest mistake against any scientific laws; one can calculate a state of the earth that occurs after millions of years. Unfortunately, however, one is in the following case. For example, if you calculate from heredity what the human stomach goes through in the course of one, two, seven years, what changes it undergoes in three hundred years, you proceed in the same way as a geologist or astronomer, in the same way as the one who put forward the Kant-Laplace hypothesis. We can calculate in the same way as for the small changes that take place in the constitution of the stomach, what the stomach must have been like 300 years ago; only it had not yet come into existence at that time. In the same way, we can calculate what this stomach will be like in 300 years. The calculation may be correct, but the result is untenable. The calculation based on the changes in the rock can be correct and it can be scientifically established that the earth was in this or that state millions of years ago; only at that time the earth had not yet come into existence and will no longer exist in the millions of years that can be calculated by the same method, because it has inner laws of life through which it has developed out of the spiritual and will in turn develop back into it like man.

Today we are already on the verge of intuiting those spirits that are healthy, on the verge of intuiting a science that is meant to be spiritual science. While those who follow popular judgment in this field are far from a healthy view of these things, which healthy view would naturally lead to spiritual science, we also find others. An example may be given. Eckermann, who emerged from Goethe's view, wrote the following words: ... [space]

This is how a healthy person thinks, how someone thinks who is not completely numbed by what is officially recognized. But he who is compelled, by what his unbiased sense of truth suggests to him, to point out spiritual science in our time, also knows in what way he and his views fit into what the best minds of humanity developed, sensed and thought even before there was any science. In our time, we can repeatedly and again and again point to the prophetic way in which Goethe foresaw spiritual science. By dealing with how, through the development of the human soul, the human being comes to juxtapose the spiritual self as spirit with the spiritual, by linking what is spiritual in the universe with a bridge to what is spiritual in the human being, one is reminded of what Goethe wrote in his book on Winckelmann out of deep insight:

He who feels the healthy nature of man as a whole, who perceives himself in his environment as a great, valuable and dignified whole, would, if the universe could feel itself, reach its goal, exult and admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Goethe, then, looked at something that can take place in the human mind, where the spirit of the universe directly beholds the spirit of the universe, where spirit confronts spirit.

Now, I can also summarize what I have said, albeit in a sketchy way, about the border areas by saying that spiritual science, when it is really strictly methodical, wants to show that even if a person only lives unconsciously, what is real is research is only raised into consciousness, that only what is always present and going on as the greatest secret in the depths of man reveals itself consciously, that the spiritual faces the spiritual, that the spiritual works with the spiritual, the spiritual recognizes the spiritual, and that the spirit creates and perceives the spiritual.