# The Human Being as a Spirit and Soul Being

## GA 71b — 1 July 1918, Hamburg

### Scientific Knowledge of the Supernatural and the True Reality of Human Life

*Notes*

Those who are familiar with anthroposophical spiritual science are well aware of the numerous objections that our contemporaries have to what is to be presented here. Not only must an expansion of the type of knowledge be sought, but a completely different kind of knowledge, and it is against this kind that the objections arise.

You have the idea of free action, but this freedom does not arise from the organization. You have a sense of freedom that would be a lie, or we would have to go beyond our organization to get to the bottom of freedom. Where do you get with materialistic knowledge? To certain limits. There must be these limits, for example, the idea of matter and force. We need these limits, we need these ideas. But we must come to the point where, when we follow these concepts, we destroy the scientific concepts. We have to place these concepts like stakes, and reality is reflected in them. These concepts are mirrors. Those who want to get behind these concepts with scientific concepts would act like someone who would smash the mirror to find the thing-in-itself behind it.

Once you have experienced this, the question arises: why is it that we set ourselves limits? Man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself these limits as he is between birth and death. A common power should be wrenched out of the soul, and that is the ability to love. Such a being could not love anything that lives in a physical body. The way we have to set limits for ourselves is closely related to our organization.

Because this has always been there, people have come to a different pole. They sought mystical knowledge within themselves. One thinks that one can find within oneself what cannot be found outside through the senses. But there, in one's own inner being, one also comes up against limits. What I have told you about self-awareness becomes denser and denser, but it is also only an image. So there too you reach limits. The futility of ordinary mysticism becomes apparent: you also reach limits. This is because man would not have to have a soul power to come to the image, to the limit, in ordinary mystical contemplation. This is the power of recollection, memory. If one were to break through this barrier, then the ability to remember would cease. One could not remember oneself in the right way, one loses the thread of memory of one's own self.

Outwardly: the ability to love; inwardly: the power of memory, which prevents us from breaking through the barriers to the outside world, to the inside.

Louis Waldstein: “The Subconscious Mind” - barrel organ tones. That which becomes part of the subconscious mind over the years changes over time, and so that which arises in the mystic as an inner vision and beauty is like the transformed tones of the “barrel organ”. Neither ordinary knowledge of nature nor ordinary mysticism can lead to the supersensible. The transformation of these powers of knowledge is necessary to reach the supersensible. One has to search in such a way that the forces through which the boundaries are created are transformed, so that one focuses on these forces and transforms them, so that they no longer create boundaries.

In honest self-knowledge, ask: What happens in the soul when we know nature? There is perception, lively and intense, when we only perceive. When we form ideas, perception is more shadowy. This is connected with the power of memory. What is weakened in the idea produces the power of memory. We always think when we perceive. We must distinguish thinking from remembering and creating ideas. One sharpens thinking for meditation by not allowing thinking to pass over into memory. Thinking that becomes images, that is meditation. Leave out everything that is abstract and never leads into the supersensible. Such thinking, the meditative, leads to memory, to recollection, it leads to imagination. That is not yet knowledge.

If you continue this exercise, you will see images pop up inside you. You then have to develop the strength to suppress these images. Then a significant spiritual experience follows. You become more self-aware. You lie in the dark night, open your eyes, but see nothing in the darkness, hear nothing in the silence. Then, with the self in the night, what you have experienced arises. It is not remembering, but looking back on the experiences that the soul has gone through, which it has descended from the spiritual into the physical. It now experiences the experiences of the soul in the supersensible. The poet says: “Time becomes space.” The events remain in time, time becomes space. One sees the supersensible of one's own soul on this path.

Those who are beginners in this matter experience disappointment in themselves. They cannot remember, that is, they can remember what they once experienced, but it does not come up with the same validity and vividness; on the contrary: there must be no memory of such experiences. The soul must make the same effort, even more than the first time, to have such experiences again and again. One more thing: such experiences come in a flash. Those who deliberate for a long time in everyday life, who dither over a decision for a long time, prepare themselves poorly for such supersensible experiences.

The other pole of the supersensible world is in the time after death. Just as the ability to remember must be weakened for the first pole, so the ability to love must be increased for the second pole.

We want to do something different with what is around us in every moment. Man must transform this will. He must permeate his life with his will. What were you like in your seventeenth or eighteenth year? How did your unconscious will work? One must strive for this, one must take hold of this will, make it conscious. An increased ability to love must come from it. This is how one enters the afterlife.

This is how one arrives at the realization that the human being is rooted in the supersensible. A chasm opens up between outward and inward experiences. The knowledge of the supersensible world can fill this chasm.

The human being is a threefold creature: a head, trunk and limb being.

*Stenographic transcription*

Dear attendees, For a number of years now, I have been given the opportunity to give this lecture on anthroposophically-based spiritual science here in Hamburg, as in other German cities, and I have always made a comment at the starting point of these considerations, which I would like to make again today by way of introduction: I can well imagine – and anyone who is familiar with what is meant here by anthroposophical spiritual science will be able to imagine the same – that many of our contemporaries will have a wide range of objections to what is presented here. Those who are familiar with these things are aware of the objections that will be raised. But he has also learned to assess the weight of these objections by knowing how much the considerations given here differ from the habits of thought of our age, how they must first pave the way to transformed habits of thought, but which will certainly grow out of the deepest, in many cases subconscious, desires for knowledge in our time and especially in the near future.

The subject we are about to discuss, ladies and gentlemen, is one that many consider to be beyond the reach of human knowledge. Not only because of this prejudice, but also because of another circumstance, objections arise mainly against what is to be said, which, from a certain point of view, are still quite understandable today, even if perhaps not justified. In order to approach the supersensible realm, one must strive not only for an expansion of ordinary human cognitive ability, but, based on certain prerequisites, which will be discussed in a moment, one must strive for a completely different kind of knowledge, a completely different way of knowing than one has already become accustomed to today. After all, it is precisely this kind of knowledge that is opposed.

However, dear honored attendees, it turns out that right at the beginning of spiritual scientific research, one must proceed from such a different kind of knowledge in relation to the supersensible. For the actual researcher of the supersensible proceeds from two experiences, not from mere logical considerations, but from two experiences. These experiences tie in with man's yearning for knowledge, with two main inner drives for knowledge, I would say, but which have been pushed very much into the background by official spiritual science in recent decades, so that when we talk about soul science, we can actually see how these two, I would say, root questions of human knowledge have been eradicated.

These two root questions are, firstly, how is the human soul itself rooted in the supersensible? There is, of course, nothing else, dear attendees, than what is called, in a broader sense, the question of immortality. And the second root question of human existence is the question of freedom. When one touches on this question, one immediately realizes that it is truly not just human desires, or the trivial fear of death, that bring man to these questions, but that there may be quite scientific starting points that lead to these profound questions of the human mind and the human urge to explore. The first thing is that actually every human being is pushed to ask himself: What are you actually, what is actually that which you call your self-awareness? If a person then tries to become clear to himself in a somewhat more developed self-knowledge, in a very lively way, what he can actually grasp with self-awareness, then he must say to himself: This self-awareness actually appears to me as a mere thought, and yet, it must be more than a mere thought, what surges up in self-awareness from the depths of the human soul.

A philosophical saying of a very, very brilliant thinker, Descartes, in which this thinker indicates how he became convinced of the certainty of self-awareness as a reality, has become very well known. The saying “I think, therefore I am” has become very well known. And many, many people believe that they can anchor the reality of self-awareness in this saying. But for every human being, dear attendees, this assertion is refuted every day, because no one can deny, when they look at the experiences of the soul with an open mind, that at least for the time between birth and death, what underlies the human self must also be different between falling asleep and waking up, when the person is not thinking. All sleep refutes Descartes' saying “I think, therefore I am”, because I am also when I am not thinking. One must take such objections in their entirety.

But the saying proves something quite different. It proves something truly not to be taken lightly, that however hard one tries to get to the bottom of it with ordinary knowledge, what actually announces itself in one's own self, in the soul self, one cannot get at anything other than thoughts, at a thought image. In ordinary consciousness, one attains nothing for self-awareness other than a mental image. If one goes through all other beings, [one finds]: Only the animals that are closest to humans [...] for them it will very soon turn out that what they experience is based in reality on their organization and the like. Man himself must say to himself in self-observation: precisely what I call the center of my being, I cannot grasp with ordinary consciousness other than as a thought, as a mere image; an image arises, and nothing other than an image. And ordinary consciousness does not yield a reality for this image. Reality must be sought by other means than through ordinary consciousness, through ordinary knowledge. Otherwise there would have to be an image of something, not a reality.

Not in the ideas that I do not have inwardly, dearest present, are all the feelings, all the inner impulses, the yearnings for knowledge, that lead man to seek how, since it cannot be attained in the sensual, the human self is anchored as reality in the supersensible. Not the fear of death alone, not the desire to continue to exist after death or to have a supersensible being, but the realization that there is an image for which one finds no reality in ordinary life, drives man into the supersensible in the face of this question. Otherwise he would have to say to himself: 'An image arises in your soul for which you have no reality'.

The second is what inevitably arises in the consciousness of human action. It is there, but it cannot be explained, no reason for it can be found in the human physical organization. It is the feeling that we have as... [illegible] that we are a free being. Freedom can be derived in theory, it is present in human consciousness, but it never ever reveals itself from the human organization. The human organization only allows us to explain scientifically that everything that flows out of it as an action flows out of necessity. If we have an awareness of freedom with regard to our own actions, then this free awareness cannot come from the sensual-physical reality, and only if one has the courage to make the right admissions about such things can one say to oneself: either you live in something conjured up by your consciousness, with a sense of freedom, which would be a lie, or you have to look for reality outside the physical-sensory reality of your organization, in the supersensible, from which the sense of freedom of your soul arises.

Thus, esteemed attendees, I have presented to you that which drives man not merely out of dark feelings, but out of very scientifically-based considerations to approach the question of the supersensible. The one who then approaches these questions will, from the scientific perspective that is meant here, have to rely on two experiences. They are usually only accepted as cognitive experiences. Spiritual science accepts them as experiences of the whole... [illegible] human being, as such experiences that are undergone by the whole extent of our soul. The first of these experiences is the one that is explained by scientific knowledge. I have already made the following comment here: spiritual science is not at all hostile to natural knowledge, but is perhaps more imbued with the full significance, the full essence of the very fruitful modern natural knowledge. But spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not merely accept this scientific knowledge, as the natural scientist himself does or as those people who want to form a world view out of their scientific appreciation do, but spiritual scientific research must experience with the whole soul: What can scientific knowledge give? Where does scientific knowledge lead?

It turns out, and I am not just saying something that can be logically deduced, but I am characterizing what is experienced by someone who is scientifically asking with his whole soul: Where do you end up with other scientific knowledge? It turns out that every scientific finding must come up against certain limits. These limits must be established through scientific knowledge. Now I could cite many such ideas that must be presented as limiting ideas of scientific knowledge, where one must simply remain at the mental level, one must present them like stakes, like boundary stakes, and say to oneself: Here you simply set these boundary stakes. You must not make the same as ordinary scientific knowledge. In this way, the idea can enter, as can thoughts, with a scientific error. I could certainly cite the atoms straight, other straight, but I need only refer to the most common scientific idea, the idea of substance and force. We need them if we want to recognize scientifically, but we have to put them there.

If we want to understand what we mean by substance and force in the same scientific way that we understand other natural laws, then we would immediately come to the feeling, by having to experience things, that we are destroying scientific knowledge itself. We can no longer maintain what we otherwise assert scientifically. We need this boundary. - Why? Yes, we realize that we put this boundary in front of us, just as we put a mirror in front of us in which we see ourselves, and only by putting this boundary in front of us does it reflect back to us what we have as a scientific idea. If we did not place it, we would have no mirror, and if we were to strive to get at what is called the thing in itself, then our endeavor would be like that of someone who says: My image in the mirror comes to meet me; I want to know what is behind the mirror and conveys the image to me, so I have to smash it so that I can see what is behind it. Thus, anyone who wants to cross the boundary of natural science removes themselves, using the example of the natural sciences themselves. The whole endeavor to get behind the essence of sensual things, with which one... [gap] itself, like the... [gap].

I have only given a brief description, but this is an experience that one must gain, that is gained by the one who again asks himself the question: What must you do scientifically to achieve that supersensible borderline... [illegible] comes to you, that forms the basis for this fruitful modern scientific knowledge? You have to set certain limits for yourself, you have to let them stand, so that the other is penetrable for you. If you have experienced this, dear audience, if you have gone through in your soul what I have just characterized, and I just want to describe and suggest today, that is, speak of experiences, if you have experienced this, then the question arises in the soul: Yes, do we want to, do we have to, if we want to understand the world scientifically, set ourselves limits? And then one comes to the conclusion that man would have to be organized quite differently if he did not set himself such limits. Man would have to be different, then he would no longer be this human being that he has to be for the period between [birth and death]. For it is connected with a very significant power of the soul that we have to set ourselves such limits by observing nature.

Once you understand what is actually going on, what arises in you is something tremendously significant. A certain strength would have to be torn out of our soul if a person were to be so constituted that the knowledge of nature offers him no limits. What would have to be torn out of the soul is the capacity for love. A being that does not come up against limits with knowledge of nature could not have within itself the ability to love anything while living in the physical body. Anyone who sees through the whole of the human being must say to themselves: the part of our being that is directed towards nature must set itself limits because this part of the human being is bound to another part that is able to love. We would not be able to love if we did not have a capacity for knowledge of this kind, which must set itself limits in our experience of nature. The same power in the soul that urges us to set such a mirror boundary, that urges us not to penetrate certain boundaries, is the same power that makes us capable of love. This part is connected to our whole being, to how we are here in the body as human beings, that we have a limited knowledge of nature.

What I have now explained to you is an experience that one can have in the knowledge of nature, but many of our contemporaries have already unconsciously had this experience, it lives in that part of consciousness, and what dawns in dark feelings is not only seen, but it is there, and because it is there in so many people, has always been there for many people, so many people seek to come to the sources of existence in a different way, to come to that which lies beyond the boundary, since supersensible knowledge must come to rest, and then they come to the other pole of human striving. They say to themselves: What we cannot find outside in the sense world, we seek through immersion in our own inner being. And there these people search with the ordinary power of consciousness, with the ordinary power of comprehension and imagination, in short, with the ordinary power of knowledge that they simply have when they are awake, to sink into their inner selves. This is called mystical insight and is understood to mean an immersion in the soul with the ordinary power of life. One thinks that one can find what cannot be found externally in the world of the senses.

And lo and behold, if one is only sincere and honest, which, of course, many mystics are not, then one comes up against a limit with this mystical insight as well. The direct experience [he] yields again: you have to descend into your own interior, but you will find nothing other than always your self, but your self in such a way that you can feel, by seeming to grasp your self, that you do not grasp yourself in your reality, /between the lines:] as I have [dis]cussed. The image becomes denser and denser, but it remains an image, it does not ascend to reality. And in the end you realize that by trying to ascend into the interior in the usual mystical way, you do not arrive at the supernatural, but at the inner sensual, and thus at a limit. And if you are honest, you realize that this comes from the fact that almost always something subjective, something that comes from within yourself, interferes with this contemplation of the inner self, and that you do not grasp something objective, but only flicker through yourself, penetrate into yourself once, so that the self becomes denser and denser. That is the second experience, the futility of ordinary mysticism dawns on you.

This in turn raises the question: where does this limit come from? This limit, you realize it little by little, by trying to gain psychic knowledge through the mystical path. It comes from the fact that man, as he is between birth and death, needs an inner soul strength that he could not have if he could simply dive down into his own self through mystical contemplation. If a person had unlimited knowledge of nature but lacked the ability to love, he would need an additional soul force if he wanted to achieve this through mystical contemplation. Why he wants to... [illegible]? What would have to be missing is something that is usually... [illegible], that is the ability to remember, the ability to remember. By immersing ourselves in our inner selves, we only reach the soul power that reflects back to us the knowledge, events and experiences of our life between birth and death. An inner mirror reflects these experiences back to us. If we were to break through this mirror inwardly, then we would enter the supersensible, but we must not break through it in the ordinary way, otherwise our ability to remember would have to be broken, and what does healthy human life depend on this ability for?

Let us just consider that in those people in whom this ability has been broken, their entire self-confidence does not work. Those who cannot remember the past in their lives more or less lose their way and go astray in life. The pathological [phenomena] in this direction are well known. Outwardly, the human being has to sit in front of himself, unable to transcend what he cannot transcend because of his ability to love. Inwardly, he has to be aware of a boundary to his inner contemplation, because the ability to remember must work within. Therefore, dear attendees, it is that one cannot gain any knowledge of the nature of the human soul through external research of that which is there... [illegible], in our time in the natural scientific observation has acquired such great merit, one has also tried to use memory, natural scientific observation to enter one's own interior.

I would like to mention an example from literature, I could mention hundreds of others, but so that it can be verified, from literature. In the very commendable Wiesbaden [publishing house, the Wiesbaden Collection, in the series] on [marginal questions of] the nervous and mental life, the following was reported in a [writing] about the subconscious self of man by Louis Waldstein. A story is told, a story in which he, the author, expresses himself about the uncertainty of self-knowledge. Waldstein apparently experiences the following: He was walking on a street and passed a bookstore. He looked at the books that were on display. There he found a book about mollusks. Of course, this can interest the scientist, but lo and behold, he is not so much interested in the book about mollusks, but rather he had to smile.

Now just think, a naturalist who sees a new publication about mollusks and has to smile. It is not the slightest reason to smile at such a title. What does Waldstein do? He wants to find out why he laughed, closes his eyes so as not to be disturbed in what he sees, in his thoughts, closes his eyes to see how he came to smile. And then he hears a hurdy-gurdy in the distance; he did not hear it when his eyes were open. The hurdy-gurdy plays the melody that he heard decades ago, but did not even pay attention to because he was interested in other things at the time: the melody that taught him how to dance. At the time, he was more interested in the charms of his partner and the steps he had to take, so he only half listened to what the hurdy-gurdy was playing. So it made only a very weak impression, but now, decades later, when the hurdy-gurdy... [illegible] strikes up the tune again, it makes him smile.

Can it not be seen from this, honored attendees, that there is much down there in our soul that is very much beyond the reach of ordinary life? The subconscious memory is added to the conscious memory. In the course of our ordinary lives and for our ordinary consciousness, we cannot possibly know what experiences we have gone through that are stored in the depths of our souls. And these experiences change in the course of life, and so one can meet some mystic who believes he is being honest and says: From the depths of my soul have arisen ideas about a supersensible world, ideas of glory and grandeur. It need not be anything other than what he heard decades ago, the organ grinder, who only partially gained influence over individuals. Just as Waldstein laughed at the book, what was transformed into the mood of the soul at the time could be transformed after decades in such a way that the most sublime idea emerges from this mood. Man must be so constituted that the experiences he has gone through between birth and now rebound down there. Therefore, the experiences that take place down there, [the mood], are never in any way decisive, but one must always be clear about the fact that what one could bring up from such mystical contemplation are nothing more than the transformed tones of the hurdy-gurdy, and some of what is recorded in mystical depths, about which... [...] is not only the result of the imagination, but the transformed sounds of the hurdy-gurdy, and that leads [...] to the realization that even if one can immerse oneself inwardly with ordinary mysticism, one cannot come to the source of the [inner] human being.

These are starting points, these are experiences that show that neither ordinary knowledge of nature nor ordinary mysticism can penetrate into the inner self. If he, [the person], has these experiences that I have described, then they give him the strength to search in a completely different direction and in a completely different way, because from these experiences the spiritual researcher gains the strength to search in a different way and in a different way, and to do that, on the one hand, courage is needed. Inner soul courage, dear audience, not to stop at all at what the experiences of ordinary consciousness are, the experiences that rightly guide us in everyday life, that rightly guide us in ordinary science , but to transform this consciousness so that dormant powers arise that are effective in a different way than those that want to enter into ordinary natural science and ordinary mysticism.

Not just the use of the ordinary power of knowledge outwardly and inwardly, but the transformation of it, the attainment of a new kind of knowledge is necessary to penetrate into the supersensible life, and precisely the two starting points, which are sure starting points for a supersensible knowledge, thus also have indications of how to search for it. One must search in such a way that one already focuses on those powers, that soul ability, through which the two boundaries are evoked, and that one brings about the transformation of the soul life in such a direction that these two soul powers can no longer give boundaries.

I have described, dear ones present, what the spiritual researcher has to do, how he has to struggle through intimate soul experiences if he wants to achieve this transformation with this faculty of knowledge, in all my writings... [illegible]. There you can read about the individual soul experiences that the researcher of the spirit and soul has to struggle with if he wants to gain knowledge. Today I want to point out, from a very special point of view, the way in which the soul has to gather itself in order to really enter the supersensible, in order to be able to cross the two boundaries that one has experienced in the way I have described. First of all, it is important to ask oneself in honest inner self-knowledge: What actually happens through the soul when it is engaged in the knowledge of nature?

What happens through the soul can be expressed through two abilities. What I am saying now can be explained very thoroughly and deeply scientifically. Of course, because spiritual science is still in its infancy, I have to express the question here in a more popular way: the abilities that a person applies when he turns to nature can be grasped as perceptual abilities. We perceive by turning to nature, and then we receive an impression through it. So we know that when we have perceptions, the perception is vivid, intense, it takes up our full attention, as if the outside world were living in us through the perception. But we also know that when we turn away from the perception and imagine the perceived, that then this imagination of the perception is less vivid, less intense, that it is more shadowy.

Does it make sense in the life of a human being, esteemed attendees, that when we turn away from perception, the imagination becomes more shadowy? Yes, it is connected to the fact that we have memory. If we want to have perception, then we have to restore a connection to the thing that causes the perceptions, we have to live together with the thing in all its liveliness. However, if we have an idea of the thing, this living together is weakened, and that which is weakened is the power that causes the memory. Please take this into account. Because we not only perceive, but also think and imagine in relation to external, sensory reality, we can retain memories.

Now the spiritual researcher must develop a different faculty of imagination, a different faculty of thought, than the ordinary one. This faculty of thought, which he must develop, he can only develop when he becomes aware in real self-knowledge of what perception actually consists of. We never merely perceive, we always think while perceiving, only we do not focus our attention on the thought process, but on perception. And it is precisely this thinking that we develop with perception, and we must distinguish it from the thinking that we develop afterwards from memory, from the thinking that merely presents. And then, when you have come to recognize how you are inside consciousness with your power of thought, then you also come to strengthen thinking itself through practice - and the practice itself is described in the books mentioned - making it lively. You sharpen mere thinking, without taking away its clarity, for meditation.

What is meditation? Meditation is a thinking that does not dissolve into memory, but is so strengthened through inner soul exercise that it proceeds as vividly as only consciousness [perception] otherwise does. Such inwardly content-filled thinking, a becoming-image of thinking, that is meditation. Therefore, it is good to train oneself to... [illegible] that one rejects all abstract thoughts – they do not lead into the supersensible – [but] that one takes up pictorial thoughts that are after-images of external sensory perception,... [illegible].

When you develop this kind of thinking, you have a very strange experience in relation to it, an experience that is extremely surprising at first. If you keep pictorial thinking present in your soul through meditation and practice, you will find that this thinking initially leads to something that cannot immediately become memory. It only leads to a feeling of being strengthened in one's self-awareness, to always powerfully guiding one's own self-awareness to what I have called the imaginative consciousness. This imaginative consciousness does not initially lead to any insight, only to a sharpening of self-awareness. What was previously an image now feels itself within the self-awareness. This... [illegible] has an effect on you... [illegible] by virtue of the fact that you have attained it through pictorial, meditative thinking.

If you continue this exercise for a while, you will experience that at first you see image after image emerging in your soul; as if by itself, the soul becomes capable of letting imagination arise within it. Then you have to gain the ability to suppress this imagination. So you have to develop two abilities in the soul: a thinking that is as vivid as only the outer consciousness is usually, and then again the ability to suppress it. Because often, when you progress in meditation, it is very dependent on the inner soul experience. I will describe this experience of the soul to you more pictorially, because what arises in this field must be described pictorially, since it is experienced through the power of pictorial thinking. If you continue such exercises, which must be intensified, you will gain the power to suppress your imagination and, at first, have nothing but self-awareness steeped in reality. Then, finally, you will be able to compare the state of mind you enter into with lying in the night: you open your eyes; you could see if it were not for the darkness. There is also silence all around, you hear nothing. But while you are lying there in the darkness of the night, the memory of what you experienced during the day comes to mind, and you remember not only that you were the one who experienced it, but also what the ego experienced during the day. One does not merely experience oneself as oneself at night, but the world one experiences. One would like to compare this with... [illegible] experience that [occurs on the path I have described.

If you have done that exercise, [see my] books, [a] sufficient period of time, [you have] brought it to having strengthened self-awareness enough for imagination, and then to have the strength of mind that the imagination in turn is suppressed... [illegible] can, then this, what arises in the state of mind, is not memory, but looking back. Just as in the comparison I made, it was looking back at day experiences, so now it is looking back at the experiences that the soul went through in the spiritual before it descended from the spiritual and united with the bodily existence that it received through the physical marriage of father [and] mother and the two inheritance currents. The soul experiences the intensified self-awareness that arises from imaginative consciousness, but not in the present. Instead, one must go back and experience oneself in the spiritual realm, in prenatal life, and with this experience of oneself, experience the spiritual world. Just as in sleep one experiences through memory what one has experienced during the day, again the self with its surroundings, so one experiences the spiritual, the supersensible of the soul with the supersensible environment, through the soul process that I have just described.

This labor initially eliminates the conscious faculty of memory. The poet expressed this intuitively when he said: Time becomes space. Having soared to such a capacity for knowledge, born out of imagination, one no longer has ordinary memory in this state, but one has a retrospective view of the spiritual experiences in the supersensible world that remain. What one has experienced there remains for spiritual contemplation, as when you are making a path, you look back at the objects you have passed, and there they are, the events remain in time. This is noticed when one learns to look at them in such a supersensible vision. Time becomes ideal space. One sees back into the spiritual state of the soul in prenatal life. In this way one really sees into the supersensible of one's own being through a transformed knowledge.

This must always be emphasized again: on the path of ordinary knowledge, there is no insight into the supersensible; this insight must be acquired in such a way that the soul develops strength, which... [not only] in a completely different... in memory, but to have something that stands as a retrospective faculty. Anyone who is a beginner in the field of supersensible knowledge, who has not undergone enough such training, can, in some cases, very soon come to certain supersensible insights. It is not even... [illegible]. But afterwards he suffers an inner [...] disappointment: that he cannot recall through ordinary memory what he has experienced, that it has passed, and that he has to go through all the events [...] [illegible] two to three times more difficult than the first time. Because he would not remember something, but approach the same mental images of reality; just as we, when we want to have an experience in the sensory world as perception, must approach the thing again, [as we] are not satisfied with memory, so memory is never enough for us for spiritual experiences. We have to do the same event. The beginner has the feeling: I had the experience; it would be a lasting one, but it does not last, it is lost to memory. The experiences of the supersensible world are quite different from those of the sensory world.

I would like to emphasize yet another characteristic of this supersensible experience. It consists in the fact that, while having the experience, one must quickly look up, therefore unfold one's attention, in order to become aware of the experience supernaturally, because it quickly passes by. There are many people who often have unique supernatural experiences, they also have them, but are not attentive because the experience will already be over when they begin to be attentive. These experiences pass by so quickly. Therefore, the training that one must undergo also includes training for presence of mind. The person who, in ordinary life, already acquires presence of mind in the face of certain experiences makes himself suitable to observe the supernatural. The other does not. The one who, on the other hand, mulls over every decision in his mind, wants to do this and that and cannot bring himself to make a quick decision and stick to that decision... [illegible] and to trust his reason, [he] does not learn to force himself to such a state of mind, he prepares himself poorly to observe supersensible experiences.

So far, I have described to you how one can gain an insight into the supersensible world in the prenatal sense. The spiritual researcher cannot, as some philosophers do, simply take the question of immortality as a unified whole with ordinary knowledge and start from there. He must first point to the prenatal life, as I have described, reaching from the supersensible to the roots of the soul before it has been conceived. The other thing, ladies and gentlemen, is that people grasp the other pole of immortality, which actually still interests people today... [illegible]. That is, they grasp the pole that leads beyond death, into the life that a person has as a soul when they have passed through the gate [of death]. [Stenograph breaks off.]