The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being

GA 71b — 11 May 1918, Leipzig

The Supernatural Man and the Questions of Free Will and Soul Immortality

[Dearly beloved attendees!] There is no doubt that a direct feeling in the human soul admits that man can present two questions as particularly significant: about the freedom of will and [about] the immortality of the soul.

There is an intimate connection between the two questions, and it is no mere coincidence if we want to consider them side by side today. In a sense, for just as long as there has been a human striving for knowledge, as long as there has been a striving for a world view, there has also been a particular effort to get to the bottom of these two questions. They are also the pivotal points of philosophical endeavor. But how much contradiction there is in this area!

Anyone who considers these two questions from the point of view of spiritual science will notice why the usual intellectual endeavor, despite all the ingenuity deployed, cannot arrive at a satisfactory solution. In our scientific age, people also want to gain insight into these questions through scientific knowledge. But despite all the admiration one must have for the successes of the natural sciences, they do not come close to these two questions.

These two questions point to a deeper self-knowledge. In doing so, all the difficulties of self-knowledge become apparent. Nevertheless, what is at stake here is a question of time - and yet scientific insight fails, for example, when it comes to the question: What is it that leads a person's true self through this life?

The question of the scientifically minded scholar, the question that he must ask himself, also concerns self-knowledge: What happens in thinking, feeling, and imagining? In his book, The Subconscious Mind, Waldstein explains this. He recounts how he stands in front of a bookstore and looks at the displays. He is a scientist himself. By chance, his eye fell on a scientific book “On Mollusks” - that was the title - and to his astonishment he discovered that it made him smile. He asked himself: Why am I smiling? What surges in my self? He closes his eyes and pays attention to everything that is going on around him. In the distance, he hears the sounds of a barrel organ playing dance music, which he had previously not heard and which only now comes to his attention because he has closed his eyes. When he first heard that music, he was still young and did his dance steps to its melody. Now, as he looks at the book title, this melody and its memory unconsciously mingle with the surging gears of his soul. He only became aware of it when he closed his eyes – and yet he had unconsciously smiled!

From this you can see that there is much, much in the depths of the soul that one does not need to know about otherwise. Much comes up that we call memory and so on, that we do not understand, that belongs to the subconscious. When you think about all this, you actually have to despair of really getting to know what is in the human self. Other examples can be found in 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. These examples show how careful one must be when approaching the question of human self-knowledge. In this consciousness, soul surges are at work that one cannot foresee. For its exploration, natural science is inadequate – it gets no further than vague memory factors, the scope of which we cannot even begin to fathom.

A completely different approach from the usual one is needed to gain this knowledge. One must seek another knowledge that lies dormant in man. For the time being, it is still difficult to make this clear to others. It is even more difficult than when the clarity of the Copernican worldview was introduced, which also demanded a complete rethinking.

The first requirement will be that something like the sounds of the barrel organ enters into spiritual-scientific knowledge. The consequence is: the striving for knowledge that is not accessible to such deception.

Spiritual science strives for knowledge that has nothing to do with ordinary memory. In order to recognize, it must exclude not only external perception from consciousness, but also the power of memory itself. It must show that one can go back to deeper layers that lie even deeper than memory – to dig into the depths of the soul that lie deeper than ordinary memory. The human soul attains such knowledge. The first thing to strive for in order to enter the spiritual world is imaginative knowledge.

Why is self-knowledge only attainable through this path? When we look into the external world with our eyes, we see everything around us. The eye does not see itself, and that is precisely why it is able to perceive other things. It is similar with the human self. It can see the things of the environment, but not itself at first. Another can see the eye. There is no possibility that the human self is examined by others. The human self must step out of itself, beside itself. This is necessary for self-knowledge. It must leave the body in which it usually lives. The human eye can see itself - namely in the mirror. But what then?

It lacks what permeates it with life – the essential. It is a mere image of the eye. Imaginative self-knowledge strives for something similar. It demands a stepping out of the personality. What is then looked at is related to the life-filled, spiritualized human being like an eye in a mirror. Hence the term imaginative, that is, image-knowledge.

We cannot suddenly enter the spiritual world. Serious striving is necessary for this, and it is only through the image that we enter into the spiritual world. The usual soul exercises must be carried out first in order to strengthen the whole soul life, to make it more intense than it is in everyday life.

For these exercises, one should therefore choose ideas that are as straightforward as possible, and preferably ones that are not reminiscent of memory or experience. It should not be a case of “immersing oneself” in memories or the like – not a “tuning of the organ grinder”.

Therefore, it is right to oversee meditation with full consciousness; to know how to form the idea. Because it depends on the applied soul power, it is good to take such meditations that are an image. The consciousness should be allowed to rest.

There have always been schools that teach such ideas. However, this deep secret has been kept for the simple reason that these ideas should not be heard and read everywhere, they should not be carried as a memory in the soul, but for the first time these images should be presented to the soul in meditation. Imagination lives in such ideas. You have to do them for years. One often thinks that the natural sciences are difficult, but spiritual science is easy. But it is not so. Those who know both know how difficult spiritual exercises are, especially when they are to lead to more incisive results, much more difficult and serious than the natural sciences. One should not be deceived by all these things.

Finally, through continued practice, one acquires a real power in pictorial representations. The soul learns to live in a world of images that is just as intense as the external sensual impressions. However, one must strictly distinguish this from all visions and hallucinations, which, although mysterious, are effluents of the bodily organization.

Spiritual science, however, deals with an inner activity that is independent of all bodily organization. One increasingly enters into a soul life where the body cannot have a say. In the imagination, memories still play a role.

But then comes the most difficult task of all! When, after years of practice, one has finally penetrated to this imaginative or pictorial knowledge, one has achieved nothing more than a certain self-education. For this world of images – and this would be a great mistake – has not the slightest connection with the objective spiritual world. One must realize that one has now only achieved an invigoration of the human self. One has incorporated a spiritual eye, but one cannot yet see with it! One feels one's self in a kind of spiritual experience, but without the help of the body as before.

The next task is to make this world of images, which now comes of its own accord, transparent. The first task was to create this world of images, the second task is to remove it again, to make it transparent, so that one has nothing but the different experience of the self. But one carries within oneself the passage through the imaginative world, what has been achieved through it. A new world is now revealed around the person. This world shows some characteristics that prove that a special experience is taking place.

Everyday consciousness leads to memories. What one learns in the spiritual world must first be translated into ordinary ideas if one wants to communicate them or remember them. One cannot remember what happened. If you want to experience the same thing in the spiritual world again, you have to make the same spiritual efforts, go exactly the same way as the first time, in order to perceive the same thing again. This disappoints many a beginner. They may well have psychic experiences soon. But they will not soon become a source of life for them either, because they are so easily forgotten and new efforts are needed to experience the same thing.

If I may give another personal example: most people always believe that if I have given a lecture several times, it should become easier and easier for me over time because it would have been memorized almost verbatim. But that is not the case at all. On the contrary. The content must always be taken from the spiritual realms anew.

There is something else to be considered here: when we live in the ordinary world, we practice many things by repeating them, and that makes it easier for us over time. In the spiritual world, it is just the opposite. If you have seen a being or a fact, it is more difficult to see the same thing the next time. The being or fact flees from you because you have already seen and experienced it. The next time you have to make a greater effort to experience it again. And thirdly, presence of mind is necessary for this: if you want to hold on to the experiences you have in the spiritual world, you need presence of mind – because they occur and have immediately disappeared again. Those who turn everything over in their minds before making a decision are ill-prepared. You have to quickly grasp a situation and act on it. And once you have acted, you should look back on it without regret, even if the matter is not successful. This state leads to presence of mind, and this is necessary for those who want to enter the spiritual world. Then it comes to you as inspiration - and only with inspiration do you face the spiritual world.

The third stage is intuition. Here the human being not only comes into contact with the spiritual world, but once one has passed the first and second stages, one is united with the spiritual as one lives in the physical body. One must completely immerse oneself in it, completely forget oneself. Namely, one must forget one's everyday consciousness – and most people have such a terrible, unconscious fear of this. Only when one emerges from intuition does one have full awareness of what one has experienced in ordinary life. One must go through this self-forgetfulness with courage, through dying to the self. Only when one enters into the spiritual world in this way can one approach such questions as we want to discuss today, because these are questions of the supersensible nature of the human being.

A quarter of a century ago, I approached these two questions philosophically in an unusual way – in The Philosophy of Freedom. I tried to make them acceptable even to those who want nothing to do with Theosophy.

The first pivot, which ties in with nature, is human thinking, which is a wonderful mystery. You do not notice much of it, otherwise you would already be on the way to the supersensible.

In the free play of ideas, there always lives – and this must be taken into account – the one pivotal point of the human soul: we have to admit that, from our own organization, we understand the play of ideas, associations and so on, but we cannot grasp the interplay with scientific ideas, thinking, the logical distinction between “right” and “wrong” in thinking. Free actions can only be those that approach with true or untrue, that do not arise from human thinking - intuitive moral intuitions that approach thinking, like the impulse of whether the thought is false or true.

The second crucial point: actions arising from drives are not free. The hidden reasons for this lie in the human organization. Other reasons can be distinguished from some actions. We have to understand this form of action. What happens when we love someone? We usually say: love is blind. No – I say: love is giving. It discovers deeper qualities that escape the other person when they immerse themselves in the other, forgetting themselves and their egos. Connected with this love is the fact that one cannot fall into the trap of which selfish love so easily falls: wanting to reform the loved one, criticizing them, wanting to remodel them. Real love intuitively embraces what is loved; it does not want to change it at all, but to leave it as it is. It only wants to live itself over into the other being - it does not want to reshape it according to its own nature.

The same can also happen in relation to an action. If I have the purest love for an action, without egoism, then I do this action out of the impulse of love - that is a free action. Anyone who goes this way, doing the actions for their own sake, is on the way to freedom.

One can approach these two pivotal points of human life with spiritual knowledge. What is it that reaches into the soul? If we have the opportunity to confront this thinking with our intuition, we make the [shattering] discovery: what stimulates us, what is accepted as “true” or rejected, does not come from our body, but is [is] inspired in unconscious inspiration. It is unconscious inspiration that plays into it. What is that? What is inspiring us? What inspires us is what the soul experienced before birth, before conception by our parents. This provides forces that become an unconscious inspiratory directing force.

Spiritual science must deepen and strengthen many a notion. The research into immortality to date simply continues the life in this world. Spiritual research asks differently: Is not the life in this world the continuation of a spiritual life before? All that is of the soul comes from a spiritual world. Below the threshold of consciousness lies the source of spiritual directing power. This life makes the idea of immortality necessary – there must be a continuation of a previous spiritual life. Immortal forces are hidden behind the spiritual forces. Therefore, one should not and need not go against scientific facts. One should only penetrate deeper. The natural scientist conducts research into material processes. Spiritual science wants to build a bridge from these to the spiritual facts behind them. Biologically, we ask ourselves: What happens in the brain while we have mental images? With spiritual science, we can approach this question. We discover what is also based in the sense organs in terms of the spiritual. While we imagine, a process of starvation takes place in the brain - partially in the brain and in the nervous system. When the main organism partially starves, we experience an unconscious inspiration.

The eyes of some animals show a sword-shaped bridge. Another consciousness is based on this. In humans, this has regressed, it is much simpler; many things die as development progresses, many things are regressed.

As soon as the head reaches its highest level – thinking – the sprouting must give way, must make way for the soul. At its highest level, it diminishes, declines, and must give way to the spiritual-soul. The head is in regression, hence the influence of the prenatal – in the fiftieth year this has an effect.

With another part of our body, the extremities, the reverse is the case. While the head is in a state of regression, the extremities are an organism that transcends itself in its development. It finds its continuation inwards, and here too over-development extends. That the extremities and the sexual organs belong together is shown in women by the overdevelopment of the arms, legs and breasts; there is something creative in these, bodily transcending itself.

After the inspirations, new imaginations arise. The outer extremities are a symbol for man's entry into the outer world through his moral or immoral influences. These unconsciously affect man even before death; they occur in a case when man acts in such a way that his actions are intuitive moral actions, and when, on the other hand, the unconscious intuitive intuitions... [of prenatal life and the imagination of post-mortal life come together], then man relates to the outer world by acting.

The inspirative prenatal life and the intuitive post-mortal life together make up the “moral imagination” or the free action of man. It consists of intuition and love.

What can be set free in a person? The supersensible personality. The immortal soul is the same in the genuine love of the free deed. What is free in a person? The immortal soul. What does the knowledge of the immortality of the soul give to life? Freedom.

Thus, soul immortality and freedom are a necessity; they are not an either-or, but a both-and. But the acquisition of freedom must be the free deed of man!