Freedom, Immortality and Social Life

GA 72 — 28 November 1917, Bern

5. The Workings of the Soul Forces in Human Beings and Their Connection to Their Eternal Being

Above all, I ask you to regard the two lectures I will give here today and the day after tomorrow as a coherent whole. Although I will endeavor to make each individual lecture understandable in itself, some things, especially with regard to the proposed topic, can only be achieved if one lecture illuminates the other in a certain way and both together form a whole.

If we now consider what underlies the reflections of the two evenings and the reflections I have already been able to make in previous lectures here in this city as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, we can perhaps express ourselves in relation to the feelings that many of our contemporaries still harbor toward this spiritual science by means of a comparison that comes to mind. That is: I would like to compare this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in a certain respect with an uninvited guest in a society. I compare the invited guests with the other, currently fully recognized scientific directions and currents, which are, so to speak, already invited to the overall spiritual life of humanity in the present, because people, through their needs, through what the outer sensory world offers, through what life otherwise demands, want to draw these various sciences into their sphere. Spiritual science still finds its place within the spiritual life of the present day as if it had not been demanded. However, even if one is initially unfriendly and insensitive toward an uninvited guest, one gradually begins to become more polite, even more polite than toward the invited guests, when one realizes that the uninvited guest has something to offer that one has lost and that he has found. One did not know this before, and one only realizes it then.

This is probably the case with anthroposophy, at least according to the belief of the few who are already able to fully immerse themselves in what anthroposophy actually wants to achieve in relation to the great tasks facing humanity. What anthroposophy wants to bring to the newer culture, the culture of the present and the culture of the future, is something that people have basically possessed in a different way for centuries, for millennia, and which they should regain through spiritual science. Instinctively, people have possessed, out of a certain instinctive soul capacity, what can be called a felt recognition of the eternal in human nature, a felt recognition of the actual human soul and its mysteries. And only those who are biased against the spiritual history of humanity can deny that this instinctive knowledge had to be lost to humanity — humanity is, after all, in a state of development — just as, at a certain point in historical development, it had to lose the medieval worldview with regard to the spatial nature of the universe, according to which the Earth is at the center, at rest, with the sun and stars moving around it. Just as this spatial worldview had to be replaced by another, so too, in the face of the great, significant, and, as spiritual science — I have often emphasized this here — the old instinctive knowledge of the eternal in the human soul and of those forces that are most valuable to human beings above all else, the power of knowledge of free will, which we will discuss the day after tomorrow, must give way to the great, significant advances in natural science that are fully recognized by spiritual science.

I believe that those who can best appreciate the true essence and deepest meaning of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science are those who recognize the great and significant advances of scientific knowledge for the overall progress of humanity and who do not merely approach it in a dilettantish manner, but also recognize the scientific to a certain degree. But precisely because humanity has been led to grasp the world with scientific methods and to extend this grasp to a worldview, it is now dependent on seeking the soul in a different way than it has instinctively sought it for centuries, even millennia.

In natural science, one can only recognize things correctly if one excludes the soul more and more from the natural realm that one has to observe and research, if one allows less and less of the soul to interfere with what one conceives as a picture of nature. This was not the case in earlier times. In earlier times — one need only be familiar with the spiritual striving of earlier times to understand this — people observed natural phenomena and instinctively felt how the spiritual and soul aspects spoke to them through these phenomena. They did not separate natural phenomena from the spiritual and soul aspects. And so, by observing nature, they brought spiritual and soul life into their own soul life through the facts and beings of nature.

Human beings would never have achieved complete liberation of their being if they had not ascended to scientific knowledge. Thus, by completely detaching the soul and accepting only nature as such in the observation of nature, by detaching itself from everything spiritual in nature for the sake of science, the soul is forced to draw ever stronger, more significant forces from its own inner soul and spirit source in order to enter the spiritual world in a new way, apart from all observation of nature, apart from all sensory life. For if anything can provide the most effective impetus for pursuing anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, it is seeing through what natural science has brought to humanity.

But as soon as people of the present, especially those who have already become accustomed to viewing the world in a scientific way, attempt to approach what spiritual science, as it is now emerging in the spiritual movement of the present, is asserting, something very significant, I would say, immediately begins to assert itself quite understandably against this spiritual science. And no one understands better than those who are currently involved in this spiritual science that it must still face many opponents at present, that it must be met with all kinds of prejudices. What this spiritual science seeks to explore is the eternal in the human soul, the working of the forces of the human soul that point beyond birth and death, that is, what is summarized under the problem of immortality, and also what is summarized under the problem of freedom. This is something that every human being naturally desires to know about. Human beings want to know something about the subjects that constitute the content of spiritual science as it is meant here. But at the same time, when we talk about the methods, the way of researching, the things that need to be done in order to penetrate the designated area, then today, because a general understanding of the matter is not forthcoming, I would say that not only opposition but even aversion is likely to arise.

And in particular, the correct understanding of this spiritual science, as it is meant here, by the fact that those who would like to approach the investigation of what lies behind ordinary conscious life in the human soul would much rather find what they are looking for in all kinds of abnormal, all kinds of depressed soul phenomena than in what real spiritual science must actually point to. And so it happens that this real spiritual science is often confused with what can certainly yield extremely interesting results, especially in the natural sciences, that spiritual science is confused with what brings forth all kinds of dreamlike, somnambulistic, mediumistic states of the soul from the unconscious or subconscious life of human beings, which eludes ordinary consciousness.

This confusion is disastrous. However, it will continue to be practiced for a long time to come, because it is true that human beings — I will only touch on this briefly by way of introduction — can, through certain circumstances, enter into states of consciousness in which the ordinary sensory world does not play a part, in which the ordinary will does not play a part either, dreamlike, somnambulistic, mediumistic states, and so on, from which they bring up all kinds of things from a certain depth of their soul life that must seem strange to people and are therefore interesting. The strange is always interesting, especially when one can believe that — as is indeed true in a certain sense — it heralds something in human beings that goes beyond the ordinary experience between birth and death. However, true spiritual science shows — and the meaning of what I am about to indicate in this lecture will reveal this — true spiritual science shows that what comes to light through dreamlike abnormal states of mind, through somnambulism, through mediumistic states, has much less real human significance than what human beings perceive through their ordinary senses and that which he can influence through his ordinary will. What he can influence through his will in everyday life is connected with the human being between birth and death. But what comes to light through the states indicated is contained in a deeper, lower part of human nature than even the sensory world. This comes about because sensory perceptions are excluded, the will is also excluded, and lower organic, base organic activities take place through which what is hidden from sensory life and the will comes to light. But this cannot describe the full, whole human being, only something that lies beneath the surface of the human being, whereas true spiritual science seeks to lead the human being above the surface of ordinary life, above what the human being strives for in everyday life and also in ordinary science. However, these abnormal states, which serve to observe something unknown in the human being, have something quite fascinating about them; because when people enter states that are much more connected to their physical life than even their sensory life, much more immersed in their body, and especially because curiosity and interest are attached to such things, they experience something in such states that can make them happy, that fills them with a certain inner pleasure. And the feeling of life that then attaches itself to the inner organs also has an effect on the viewer, on the observer; he believes himself to be secure in relation to these things, believes that he has something real before him, which he experiences in a human being whom he himself has changed: while the spiritual researcher leads to the truly eternal, to that which extends beyond birth and death. He must also point to the transformation of ordinary human nature; he must point out that the eternal cannot be explored with the senses, nor within the ordinary sphere of the will, which relates only to the external world; but when he comes and describes what the human soul must go through in order to free itself from the body, so that it can observe the soul not only with the body but also with the soul, he then describes states in which the human being, from the perspective of ordinary consciousness, feels something like standing on uncertain ground, like standing on the edge of an abyss. This makes him seem all the more dreamlike and fantastical. However, when the spiritual researcher speaks of his research results, he is dependent on not leading to the experiment, not to the observation of the outer senses, as the natural scientist can, but he is dependent on leading to the soul itself. Therefore, what he presents must, in a certain sense, take a different path than when one discusses something scientifically. When discussing something scientific, one first describes: this is done and that is done, or this is here, this is there, and then one links one's mental activity, one's ideas, combinations, attempts to discover laws about what is there, and so on. One links what the soul has to do from within itself to something that already exists.

The spiritual researcher must reverse this approach. And that is what is striking at first, what seems paradoxical at first, so paradoxical that those who cannot grasp the matter say: Yes, the spiritual researcher only claims that things are this way, but he does not provide any evidence. Well, his evidence consists precisely in showing how the soul must first go through the processes that are purely inner and spiritual, and then can approach the spiritual process, the objective. So while ordinary science has the process first and then adds what the soul does, the spiritual researcher must do this himself, leaving the soul alone with itself. Then the soul brings forth such powers, such abilities, through which this and that appears before man as a spiritual fact that cannot be seen with the eyes or grasped with the hands. The most important evidence lies in showing the path that spiritual research must take.

In previous years, when I have lectured here, I have explained some of the paths the soul must take in order to truly awaken to what can be called seeing consciousness, what, to vary Goethe's expression, can be called the spiritual eye, the spiritual ear, so that one truly sees the spiritual; I have explained what the soul must do, how, through pure soul exercises, it evokes within itself, as it were, what the body evokes by organizing eyes and ears out of itself, and how, through the possession of such spiritual organs, the spiritual can truly be seen through. In order not to repeat myself for those esteemed listeners who have been here more often, I refer you to my books for details on how the soul must proceed in order to bring forth those powerful forces that otherwise lie dormant in its subconscious, so that it can grasp and see them: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and my “Secret Science,” to all the books that describe what the soul must accomplish in order to truly equip itself with new spiritual organs for seeing the spiritual. However, I would like to always mention a few fundamental principles with regard to the path of spiritual research, and so today I would like to say something about how the spiritual researcher arrives at his facts, which we will discuss later.

For those who cannot really engage intimately with the inner soul exercises that the human soul must undertake in order to find the eternal in themselves and in other beings, the convenience of simply putting people into abnormal, mediumistic, or somnambulistic states in order to perceive something strange ceases; this convenience ceases. And then, when people approach unprepared what is required in terms of spiritual exercises in order to truly see the spirit and its life, then, yes, then the interest I spoke of at the beginning ceases. So that one can say: every individual is interested in the objects that spiritual research seeks to recognize. But they are less interested in the way of thinking, in the method. What the spiritual researcher has to do in order to penetrate the real spiritual world is not as entertaining, interesting, or attention-grabbing as the experiences of the somnambulist or the medium are at first glance to the outside observer. No, as paradoxical as it may sound, it is fair to say that what the soul has to do in order to explore its most precious, most valued, highest, eternal spiritual values initially evokes aversion and indifference. One will initially find that the soul exercises of which the spiritual researcher speaks are perhaps first performed out of curiosity by one person or another, but are then easily and quickly found to be boring. And what must be undertaken in the soul in order to attain the eternal, the content of the immortal being in the soul, is also often found to be boring and not worth the interest. At first, especially when people become aware, through the strengthening of their thoughts and a change in their feelings, which I will discuss later, when people become aware that they are approaching the edge of what can be called the spiritual world, at first it is fear of the unknown. People refrain from entering this world because they are afraid of the unknown. They are not conscious of this fear, but unconscious fear is no less fear. Then an aversion, even hatred, makes itself felt—I will give examples of this today.

These are entirely understandable phenomena. It is therefore necessary to overcome them. Those who truly enter the spiritual world through their soul must go through their own soul drama. And one can say: if there are people who initially penetrate without further ado, who are interested in the tedious spiritual exercises of which the spiritual researcher speaks, it is because, through a certain shift in human attention and human interest, what is completely tedious ultimately becomes interesting through its tediousness. Through such soul exercises, through the strengthening of the thoughts, the feelings, and also the will taking a different direction than they have in ordinary life and in ordinary science, the soul actually comes to recognize how it uses the body to evoke the memories of ordinary consciousness in order to live in ordinary existence.

In principle, I want to emphasize something today that can occur first in spiritual research, as a kind of path to inner soul experiment, which can then open the way to the spiritual world. The further course of my discussions will already explain the more or less justified nature of what I am saying here.

When one is caught up in one's experiences in the present moment or in the present day, one cannot at all access that part of the soul that belongs to the eternal. What the spiritual researcher first notices when he truly strengthens his soul so that it can perceive independently of the body is that in his ordinary everyday life, man is extremely dependent on a certain widespread presence. One always uses the body to experience what one experiences. And one can say that if one experiences only the present, only what is around us and happening in the present, then one is excluded from one's soul experience, just as one is excluded from experiencing the day when one is in deep, dreamless sleep. As strange and paradoxical as it may sound, people sleep through the spiritual, the eternal in human nature, through the experience that the present offers them through their senses and their ordinary will. People sleep through their spiritual life. Sleep extends thoroughly into daily life.

How is that actually? It is like this: those who develop the gift of self-observation — it must first be developed, it is not readily available in ordinary consciousness — realize that they cannot bring what they have experienced today, or even what they experienced yesterday, into their soul in such a way that they are able to perceive it in the light of eternity. Our physical body always influences what we experience in the present. Only when we have moved beyond an experience by two or three days, as inner self-observation shows, when an experience, an observation, anything we have gone through in ordinary daily life, has passed two or three days ago, only then has it reached a state in the soul where we can recognize its true spiritual nature. Before two or three days have passed, that part of us which perceives this soul aspect is still so permeated by sensory impulses, by impulses coming from the inner body, that we are unable to separate out certain things, unable to grasp any experience as it lives in the soul, and only in the soul as soul. We must therefore generally refrain from examining the spiritual content of what we experience in the present. But the peculiar thing is that when everything physical, everything that echoes from the senses, everything that still has an effect on the bodily sensations from within the body, when that is gone and the thing is only a memory—we can of course remember some experience in an indefinite way—when the thing is only a memory, then we can no longer recall so directly the actual active part that the soul took in the experience. We can remember the experience, but we cannot have this experience before us in the same way that we process a present experience. But without being able to do this, without being able to immerse ourselves in something that has been detached from us for two or three days in such a way that we experience it as vividly as a present event, we cannot approach the spiritual, the eternal at all. However, it is a great mistake to believe that something that happened two or three or more days or years ago and is remembered can be experienced in the same way as a present event. Not only has it faded, but above all, the soul cannot develop the immediate inner activity that it develops in a present event when it is confronted with a past event. The soul's own activity is dormant in relation to the past experience. The past experience comes up as an image. But what one experiences in the present does not come up with it. That must be awakened. One can develop what is to be experienced there in relation to any event or experience long past, if one is fortunate enough to do so. Unless one happens to be a spiritual researcher, it is best not to engage in considering memories that lie very far back, but rather to take those that are recent, from two or three days ago, because this is the surest way to achieve what is to be achieved. If you take an event that happened two or three days ago, it is best to choose an event that was experienced for the purpose of leading to the eternal in the soul in this way. Ordinary experiences do not do this at all. Therefore, the spiritual researcher will be compelled to carry out what are called thought and feeling exercises. Through these thought and feeling exercises, for example by concentrating on thoughts much longer than one normally does in everyday life, one is able to experience inner soul life from the very beginning, earlier than people normally experience it. And then, if we consider the shortest period of time, as I said, after two or three days this can be the case, we are able to really look back through ordinary memory over these two or three days.

So let us understand each other: after a while, the spiritual researcher comes to view what the last two or three days have brought him in terms of experiences as if in a tableau. This is necessary. It is necessary to really make present what one has experienced in the last two or three days. If one has practiced the necessary self-observation, one will feel everywhere how the physical organs are still involved in what one has experienced in the last two or three days. Once one has become accustomed to living in the soul, the memories of these two or three days can run through one's mind as if they were happening in the moment, so that one has a picture of these two or three days before one. But in these two or three days, it is not the case that one has the soul detached from the physical body before one, but rather, for what one remembers from these two or three days, one has the soul before one, but it is everywhere infected, everywhere influenced by the physical experience. It is only like a memory spread out over these two or three days and acting quickly.

It is different with regard to the event that then lies two or three days in the past. If, after reviewing the two or three days as I have described, you have made yourself capable of really living through this event as if it were present, then you are living in a spiritual state.

You see, I am not describing anything abstract, no conceptual constructs, but rather what the soul does with itself in order to first detach itself, through a certain passage of time, from that which cannot be experienced solely through the soul, and to return to something that can now be experienced through the soul. However, the soul life must be strengthened so that one can truly be present in something that is now two or three days behind in the course of life. Then one knows what these two or three days mean in the inner soul experience of human beings.

In this way, one learns to recognize something that can only be recognized in this way. One learns to recognize that everything we experience spiritually in the present detaches itself from the body, becomes spiritualized, and is only truly spiritualized after two or three days. But then it rests in such darkness of consciousness for the ordinary consciousness that the person sleeps through it if they have not prepared themselves to live inside. But if they have prepared themselves, they know that they are now with their creative soul, with what their soul has not otherwise experienced: they find themselves inside a purely spiritual-soul experience.

Of course, this can be sought for experiences further back in time; but then one is faced with the significant necessity of really seeing through everything that has happened up to this experience, perhaps years ago, as if in a tableau. This is, of course, much more difficult than what has happened in the last two or three days, which one tries to carefully reconstruct in one's memory. Only when one has completed this, traced it back piece by piece, and still has enough strength left in one's soul to experience what then occurs, does one know through direct experience: Now you have grasped in your soul what is only spiritual, what works within you but does not appear at all in ordinary consciousness. In ordinary consciousness, even memory does not work in such a way that anything approaches the liveliness that is necessary to experience it as soul. That which brings memories to light is always accompanied by the physical. The power of memory is initially bound to the physical, even if it is not due to the physical.

I have thus pointed out to you that through a very specific inner experience, through something that must be carefully prepared and for which one must carefully train oneself inwardly, the actual soul in human beings is discovered. Once you have discovered this true soul, you know that it is within you. You know that when you have the opportunity to approach this same soul again, it will be there. For when you discover it, you know that this soul is now independent of all the sensory. The sensory only has an effect up to the point in time when you discover it. This soul aspect is now there, independent of the sensory aspect; this soul aspect has now also become independent of the will and is not bound to the external organs of movement of the human being. By grasping this soul aspect, you know that what is grasped with the quality of duration is that which grasps this duration in such a way that the human being carries through death. That is what is eternal in human nature. And now we know why this eternal aspect eludes ordinary everyday consciousness, because this everyday consciousness develops only with the help of the body, because that which does not develop with the help of the body is experienced by this ordinary everyday consciousness only as deep sleep is experienced. Just as when one brings up experiences from deep sleep that are so dull — they are there, of course — that ordinary consciousness does not perceive them, so one lifts out of the inner source of the soul that which is found in the way I have described.

One can say: such a thing is the first stage of the life of the soul, which already gives something, immediately, not merely conceptually, but gives immediate insight into the soul. One has this before one's contemplative consciousness, which passes through the gate of death. And in having this, one knows that human beings, living directly within a soul, are not dependent on the present with this soul; one knows that this soul has duration in itself and that it brings forth what human beings now experience.

When the spiritual researcher describes to you what happens at death, he does not describe it from his imagination, but by continuing what I have just explained. He knows that the soul, in freeing itself from the physical body, needs two to three days of retrospection before it enters into itself, into its own being. In this way, he learns in his own soul what the soul experiences as it passes through the gate of death. He learns to recognize how this soul, as it passes through the gate of death, still has a two to three days of looking back, a tableau of life; how this review then descends; how the soul, two to three days after death, having become completely free from physical experience, enters the actual soul realm and lives in the same element in which the spiritual researcher lives during the two to three days when he carries out the inner experiment I have told you about.

These soul exercises, which lead to experiencing the soul-spiritual and the soul-spiritual environment, can be found in the writings mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science.” They can be carried out by anyone, but do not have to be. I must emphasize again and again: the spiritual researcher introduces what must be done by the soul in order to reach the spiritual-soul world; but it is not necessary to go through these exercises oneself if one wants to be convinced of the truth of what spiritual research brings to light. The spiritual researcher himself, strange as it may sound, does not gain anything for his eternal life from what he achieves through his exercises, from what spiritual research actually gives him, from this insight into the spiritual world. he does not have anything for his eternal life, but only through this does he have something for his eternal life, that he is able to transform what he sees as soul-spiritual into the ordinary, common concepts of common sense. Common sense can understand what the spiritual researcher has to say when he transforms what he sees in the spiritual world into concepts and ideas.

This common sense must only free itself from all the prejudices that are still piled up so high today against real understanding. But on the other hand, it is a requirement of modern man not merely to believe something to be true on the basis of good faith, but to convince himself of everything to a certain degree. That is why there must be writings today that enable everyone, as the aforementioned writings do, to verify what the spiritual researcher says. However, the objections that are very often raised by people who believe themselves called upon to judge are, as far as possible, beside the point. They say, for example: When a spiritual researcher talks about how he or those who are led by him into spiritual research really look into the spirit, how they observe the spiritual-soul life of other people, then let them show us. We will bring them some people; they should know nothing about what is going on in the soul and spirit of these people, but they should observe these people with spiritual vision. Then they will be able to make their statements. If these are accurate, then we will believe them.

It is very strange that this objection has been raised — I discussed it at the end of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Mysteries of the Soul) — that it has come up again and again, while spiritual research gives everyone the opportunity to investigate and says: This and that can be done; you can convince yourself of everything that the spiritual researcher claims. Instead of convincing oneself in this way, people demand something from spiritual research that must destroy all spiritual research. For that which is to be observed by the soul constantly eludes observation when any kind of bondage approaches the soul, when any kind of compulsion approaches it, when the powers it develops do not arise from within itself. This cannot be done by observing external experiments; everyone can only do it for themselves. But if they make the effort, they will come to the same conclusion as the spiritual researcher. The external arrangement for this, the experiment, is something that must drive away the abilities of the spiritual researcher, just as life is driven away when the organism is cut up. As strange as this may sound, it is so.

I have guided you to how the soul can be experienced. Of course, this is only a beginning. Such exercises must be repeated again and again. One progresses further and further until finally a spiritual realm with beings surrounds one, just as the sensory world is spread out before the senses. But this spiritual perception has special characteristics. And I would like to mention some of these characteristics. First of all, when the spiritual researcher has an experience, looks at this experience, becomes aware of this experience, one might believe that such an experience must behave in the same way towards the human being as any other experience of the outer sensory world. This is not the case. It turns out that when the spiritual researcher has such an experience, he cannot bring it into his memory, into his ordinary memory. Just as one must go beyond ordinary memory, as I have shown, for two or three days, so one also comes out of memory when one enters the spiritual world. Once you have seen something spiritual, you cannot simply incorporate it into your memory so that you can remember this spiritual experience. You have to evoke it again and again. You must understand this: when the spiritual researcher succeeds in bringing his experiences into ideas, into concepts, he has concepts like ordinary ones; he can of course remember those. But that is not the spiritual experience, that is the conceptual image. One can remember that. But one cannot remember the spiritual experience. Spiritual experiences are facts that exist in the spiritual world. One can look at them, but they do not stick in the memory. If the spiritual researcher wants to have such a spiritual experience again or repeatedly, it is not enough for him to simply muster the energy he would otherwise expend on a memory; that will lead him nowhere. Instead, he must induce the same inner soul events in himself again; he must do exactly the same thing he did to arrive at the experience. Then he can approach the same experience. The fact that a spiritual experience is not imprinted on the memory, that it can only be relived through those inner soul events, is proof that what truly lives in the spirit is lasting and cannot be destroyed by death. It has permanence.

Thus, the way in which the spiritual researcher experiences proves the independence of the spiritual-soul from the physical. The spiritual researcher would immediately have to be convinced that just as his sensory perceptions disappear with death, so too would his soul experiences have to disappear with death if he could remember them. For even those forces that are bound to memory are attached to the mortal body. One encounters the immortal only when one is beyond what memory is.

I would like to mention another strange experience, one that strikes many who engage in spiritual exercises. When one sets out in ordinary life to do something over and over again, it provides a certain amount of practice. You get better and better at it. Strangely enough, the opposite is true of spiritual experiences: once you have had a very vivid, very lively spiritual vision, once you have looked into something that has spiritual permanence, and you want to bring it about a second time, a third time, it proves difficult and increasingly difficult, and you have to make greater efforts. There is no practice, no habit; you have to try harder and harder to get it again. Spiritual experience flees from us, so to speak, once we have had it.

This strikes many people for a particular reason: when someone approaches a spiritual experience for the first time, they have many reserves within them, much that has been dormant until now and has now been awakened to spiritual vision. Under certain circumstances, they can have a very vivid spiritual experience. If they are not yet sufficiently prepared, not yet mature enough, and immediately take the opportunity to do it again – previously they did it more through their reserve power, from the subconscious, than fully consciously – then they can no longer do it, and they may be very unhappy about this because, above all, they want to have the experience. And they often shy away from the effort of practicing more intensely and becoming more active spiritually in order to be able to give themselves the opportunity to have this experience again. So you see, the opposite of what is so important to us in ordinary life applies here. Acquiring knowledge in order to repeat things is out of the question when it comes to soul experiences. The more we approach them, the more soul experiences separate themselves from the physical and thereby reveal their spiritual-soul peculiarity.

Furthermore, it is absolutely essential that, if one wants to have spiritual experiences, one must be prepared for them with one's conceptual and imaginative life. One enters into a spiritual confusion that is not pathological, but only a mental confusion, yet one that leads to all kinds of illusions when one has a spiritual experience that cannot be grasped with concepts, that cannot be understood. So you have to try to make your conceptual understanding mature and increasingly mature before you approach the spiritual experience. Just as you need a mature eye to perceive colors, you need a mature imagination to really grasp what you encounter spiritually.

What the spiritual researcher describes can therefore be understood in every detail by common sense, if one observes life, if one compares what the spiritual researcher has to say with what everyday life presents. One does not need to be a researcher oneself; and the researcher himself only reaps the fruits of his research when he can transform his spiritual visions into ordinary, understandable ideas, which he communicates to himself in the same way that he can communicate them to others. The spiritual researcher must also understand these ideas through his common sense. In this way, others can also understand them. What the occultist has from the results, the fruits of spiritual research, can be had by anyone without being a spiritual researcher himself. Only to convince oneself that things are true does one need spiritual research.

Now, I would like to say that there are certainly some objections that can be raised against the practical significance of the results of spiritual science. And in discussing some of the results of spiritual science with reference to this, I must of course claim that this other path of spiritual research be taken into consideration. First, the soul must be prepared, then one comes to the facts of the results. The researcher does not say, “This is so or so,” but rather, “If one makes the appropriate preparations in the soul, one arrives at spiritual facts that present themselves in such and such a way.” The evidence lies in the nature of the research. Of course, I cannot present all these things in detail in a short hour; one would have to give not only ten lectures, but a course lasting many months to convey what needs to be conveyed. It is therefore quite understandable if one finds that the spiritual researcher gives only elementary hints about the path, but then presents riddles that seem to have been plucked out of thin air. But they are not; rather, if the path is followed correctly, with scientific precision, just as a newer science wrestles with its riddles, research can be conducted with the same precision in a spiritual-soul manner.

First of all, I would like to mention such a fact of life, such a connection in life, by referring to the statements of those people who, based on the prejudices and preconceptions of the present, say again and again something like this: Why research what lies beyond death? Why research this eternal aspect of the human soul? When death approaches, I will see how things are, I can wait and see. — Nothing could be more incorrect than this. Spiritual research shows, when it encounters souls that have attained independence from the body after death, that these souls live in an environment that they themselves have prepared between birth and death. Here in the sensory world, we live in the sensory environment. This sensory environment approaches us. After death, we live as souls in what we have brought to consciousness about the spiritual between birth and death. And what was not there for us between birth and death is not an external world for us after death. Our inner world—this becomes a great law of spiritual knowledge—insofar as we have consciously perceived it as spiritual, not through spiritual vision, but by recognizing through common sense what spiritual vision brings, becomes our outer world. And after death, we have only that as our outer world which we had as our inner world between birth and death.

If, between birth and death, we acquire only ideas that are connected with the outer sensory world, or ideas that are attached only to the material, then our environment after death must be constructed from such ideas. Since I want to show that spiritual science leads to concrete, real results, I will not shy away from saying what is still considered ridiculous by many today, just as the Copernican worldview was considered ridiculous when it first appeared; but these things must be said. If we acquire nothing between birth and death other than ideas taken from the sensory world, taken from life in the outer sensory world, then that is our inner world during physical life and will be our outer world after death. And the consequence of this is that those souls who have not made an effort to become aware that behind the sensory world there is the spiritual world are banished to the earthly sensory sphere until, after death, where it is much more difficult, they have freed themselves from the belief that there is no spirit, from the habit of not looking toward the spiritual. A spiritual environment of a different kind than the earthly-material one can only be acquired by passing through death with ideas that are conscious of the existence of a spiritual world. Therefore, souls who do not acquire this consciousness will be held in the earthly sphere after death. They can be found there by those who have paved the way for themselves through spiritual research.

And what is even more deeply imprinted on the soul by this fact is the following: when one finds souls on the path indicated, one learns to recognize that these souls only have a beneficial effect in the earthly sphere when they act on this earthly sphere through the body. Here in the earthly sphere, we are placed in the right relationship to our surroundings through the body. If we remain in the same environment after death, as the fact indicated shows, then we have a destructive effect. Then we are connected in the wrong way. Anyone who is a true researcher knows that when people here believe that destructive forces come of their own accord and dissolve of their own accord, when destructive forces flow into human life without there being any concrete real reasons for this, then it is the souls of those who have not found spiritual consciousness here and who then have a destructive effect on this earthly life after death.

Once this truth, which is still ridiculous to many today, is understood—that human beings bind themselves to the earth in order to be destructive after death for earthly conditions, that they intervene in a sad and angry way among human beings on earth after death—then a concrete relationship between human beings here and the spiritual world will be gained, then it will become a cosmic duty, a duty to the world order, not to limit oneself to what can only be experienced externally in physical life, but to experience in such a way that one is permeated in one's inner experience by the fact that one is spiritually connected with the eternal core of one's being to the spiritual world, which is just as much around us as the sensory world, only that ordinary consciousness does not perceive it. Just as the farmer who has never heard of air does not believe that air surrounds him, but thinks that there is nothing there, so too, through ordinary consciousness, we believe that where something cannot be perceived by the senses, there is nothing. The spiritual world is there, and it can be perceived when consciousness for this spiritual world truly awakens.

Another fact I would like to mention is this: one learns to understand how that which is not actually accessible to natural science is only accessible in a negative way — the intelligent will agree with me that I am making this assertion — how death has thereby entered the realm of research. While natural science basically deals only with what is ascending development, growth, the spiritual researcher learns to recognize the intervention of descending development, the intervention of death in development itself. He learns to recognize the role that death plays; he learns to recognize this from concrete facts.

Let us take an example: Let us assume that death approaches a human life violently, caused by something in the outside world, such as a rock falling on someone, a house collapsing on them, or someone being shot on the battlefield — all violent deaths. In the context of the world, there is something inexplicable about this for human beings. When the spiritual researcher approaches and penetrates further and further into knowledge, he learns to recognize that not only is what I mentioned earlier the case: my entire life is contained in my present human life, from birth until now, except that what goes back two or three days has already become spiritualized. If the researcher advances further, not only strengthening his thoughts through inner exercises, but also strengthening his emotional life, so that the feelings that arise in the course of life are perceived, he can compare the spiritual experience with a musical experience, with a tone, a sound, a noise. When one experiences music, one must be able to recognize the tone. By continuing in this way, one learns to connect one experience with another, to combine a soul experience that lies two or three days in the past, as I have described, with another that may lie seven or nine years in the past. One can feel in harmony, not analyze philosophically, but feel in harmony what is experienced in time, what presents itself as spiritual, alongside duration, as I have described. This is experienced musically, spoken as a comparison, when a person has their experience in front of them in this way. Then they can also extend this, independently of the time between birth and death, not only to two or three days or years ago, but to what happened before birth or conception. There they experience themselves as spiritual-soul beings before they descended and connected with a physical body, which gives them external sensory perception and the ability to interact with the external world. And if they advance even further, if they advance to a level of knowledge that I will characterize in the following description, they also experience themselves in past earthly lives, they experience the things that have an effect from past earthly lives. And when the human being has truly developed the insight within himself through which he experiences the soul directly, through which he is able to know how the soul is present in duration, then a moment comes in life that has a profound impact on this life, when the human being can say to himself: You have connected with the spiritual-soul. That is a fateful event! — This says much more than can actually be expressed in words. One does not need to become dull to the rest of life; on the contrary, one can become much more sensitive to everything that can uplift human beings, lift them out of ordinary daily life to the highest happiness; one can experience what plunges us into deep unhappiness, one can participate in all fate. Nevertheless, there may come a moment when we say to ourselves: Stronger than any other stroke of fate is the one in the human soul in which knowledge becomes so concrete for us, so alive, that we grasp the spiritual. Then this fateful experience of knowledge spreads over our whole life, and we also understand the rest of fate. We understand how our present fate is caused by previous earthly lives. We come together with previous earthly lives, not remembering, for spiritual experiences as such cannot be remembered directly; but something arises that is much higher than memory: the perception of the past.

This is what must happen if a person wants to explore something like violent death, which enters into life. It cannot be explored if one considers only one person's life. In this one life, it appears as a coincidence. Violent death is frightening. But if we see how the whole of human life consists of the lives between birth and death, in which we are connected to the body, and the intervening periods, which are much longer, in which the human being is spiritually in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, then we find that what enters human life violently as death is a significant experience. The soul is, in a sense, torn away in an instant from the life of the body, through which it is connected to the sensory world; because it is not spontaneously driven from within into the spiritual world, but is grasped by the outer world itself, it is endowed with a very special inner power precisely through the experience of the outer world.

It is a law of the spiritual world: the inner becomes outer when the soul enters the spiritual world. And the outer experience here becomes inner; an experience such as a violent death becomes inner. What is a violent death in one life appears in the next earthly life as a force that emerges from the ordinary world of life.

When we find in a person's earthly life that this person was able to accomplish something special at a particular moment, that they gave their whole life a new direction, as if something had emerged from unknown depths in their soul: this comes from a violent death in a previous life. These forces, which give life a new direction, are now being researched extensively, and there are many descriptions of how people suddenly give their lives a new direction. Such things lead back to violent deaths, which of course should not be sought in any way. For a death that is sought as a violent death would no longer be one that is brought about from outside. Of course, this cannot be desired. The desire for such a death would, for example, make violent death similar to the death that usually occurs from within the organism, which is caused from within the body itself. Yes, not only would it make it similar, but it would even put the person in a different relationship than ordinary death. Ordinary death, which is caused from within at any age, brings with it for the next life cycles what is more of an evenly progressing life, as it was originally intended from childhood and birth. A violent death, however, sought through suicide or through desire, would affect the person in such a way that they would not be able to cope with their life in the next life cycle, that they would become, so to speak, unstable. The desire to find a violent death in some way must not be allowed to enter our lives. Properly understood spiritual science has nothing to do with any kind of hostility toward life.

You see, by seeking the effect of the soul forces in a concrete spiritual scientific way, not just in an abstract philosophical way, one arrives at real individual results that make human life understandable. I wanted to offer a few suggestions about this today. I know that when one does not speak in abstract terms but presents such concrete results of spiritual research, one often encounters not only resistance but also the ridicule of one's contemporaries. I have already said that this aversion begins today when the spiritual researcher merely presents his method, his way of researching. If one wants to judge what the spiritual researcher has to offer based on what one already knows without spiritual research, then it is no wonder that what the spiritual researcher presents appears to be mere rhetoric, even before he has developed his method, which provides evidence for the independence of spiritual life. These methods are very often judged as something that does not lead to any facts. Now I would like to know whether what is presented in the two lectures today and the day after tomorrow are not weighty facts that affect life; what could be more weighty than this message of violent death and of being condemned to play a destructive role after death if one has not permeated oneself with certain spiritual ideas between birth and death.

The point is this: when such things are mentioned, it is not necessarily the case that the person recounting them is not presenting them as fully valid facts, but rather that the listener may not be able to see through to their reality, so that they remain mere phrases for him. What the spiritual researcher has to say will often remain mere rhetoric for our contemporaries today. Hatred, I said, will perhaps often be directed against the method of research itself. I would like to give a few examples of this, for these examples are not only significant because of what they directly characterize, but at the same time they reveal something about the nature of spiritual research itself.

Very recently, I gave a lecture in a city in Switzerland on the same subjects I have spoken about today. A few days later, I received a letter from a very polite person expressing how a person of the present day who had listened to the lecture felt about what the spiritual researcher had to say, how he currently still feels about what was presented. Since the letter is very polite, I would like to quote some passages from it in order to characterize something of spiritual science in terms of how ordinary consciousness relates to it.

First of all, the person in question says that what I have presented did not strike him as fact at all, but writes: In my humble subjective opinion, there was not a trace of fact in this nonsensical teaching. The doctrine of reincarnation seems to be at the center of your spiritual research. With all your, as you say, thirty years of study and research, have you not yet discovered how ridiculous it would be if a human spirit, after having developed and worked its way up during its earthly life, had to fall back into childhood and have concepts explained to it again...

This is an objection that can, of course, be made very easily, but it is completely irrelevant to those who know what the soul is like when it is found in the way I have described today. At the same time, one knows that even after going through many earthly lives, this soul can go through these earthly lives again and again for its own enrichment, and can go through them in such a way that certain things that one truly finds to be a great deficiency in oneself when one discovers the soul, one could truly no longer go through in old age, but must go through again from childhood onwards. Anyone who looks at human life as it extends beyond death and birth knows that it is just as ridiculous to say that one does not want to return to childhood as it would be to say: I have now learned French, I have learned German, why should I now, if people demand it of me, also learn Chinese? Why should I now learn it word for word, syllable for syllable, with all the grammar?

These objections show that there is no willingness to go along with these things. But they would not be made if it were not for what I have spoken of: a certain aversion to spiritual research. And this aversion stems essentially from the following: When the soul is led to its own nature, it must realize that it needs to go through many earthly lives, that it often does not possess the perfection it attributes to itself in later earthly lives, because it does not originate from its own essence, but rather from its cultural environment, and that it is not its actual property.

And so it comes about that when the spiritual researcher has to describe this soul, he must describe it, as it were, in its nakedness, how it is in need of going through repeated earthly lives, that then the person becomes angry, namely angry when the things of spiritual research are described, because he senses that the soul is not what he would like it to be. One touches on much that is unconscious and subconscious in these souls; but this unconscious and subconscious must be pointed out.

Much more interesting than this letter, which comes from a polite person who, in his honesty, expresses concern about anthroposophical teaching, much more interesting than this polite letter is something else. I would just like to mention that this letter, after everything has been dealt with as I said earlier, concludes with the man saying: I would be delighted to receive a reply from you. — One cannot be more polite!

Now, that a person can become evil when confronted with what is truly spiritual, I would like to prove from a single phenomenon, which is of course known to few, but which is nevertheless significant enough to be mentioned. There is a contemporary philosopher — whom I hold in high esteem — named Richard Wahle. I have admired Richard Wahle since his first philosophical appearance because he has succeeded, through great acumen, in presenting everything that humans perceive with their senses in such a unique way that it appears completely as an image that is entirely free of anything spiritual. We still mix in the spiritual when we describe the sensory. Richard Wahle has succeeded in describing everything that humans experience in their sensory life in such a way that he completely expels the spirit, so that only what can be perceived by the senses remains, and everything spiritual must go bankrupt. This had to be done once, and it is interesting that it has been done. It relates to what we experience as the world in the same way as if someone had a wonderful painting in front of them and wanted to describe nothing of what it depicts, only how the splashes of color are arranged. But it would be interesting to see what it is like to have a wonderful painting described in this way, only in terms of how the splashes of color are arranged next to each other. If one does this with great acumen in relation to world phenomena, that is also a merit. This is how the philosopher Richard Wahle, who is probably a philosopher in the present day precisely because of this—he is one of the most characteristic—has achieved something very special in his further career. I have never, and I am quite familiar with the philosophical literature of the world, without saying so out of vanity, heard anyone rant about philosophy and the uselessness of philosophy as much as Richard Wahle in his books “Das Ganze der Philosophie” (The Whole of Philosophy) and “Über den Mechanismus des geistigen Lebens” (On the Mechanism of Intellectual Life). No matter how hard one tries as a philosopher, humans have no more philosophy than animals and differ from animals only in that they believe they must somehow fight against the spiritual world and cannot do so. - Wahle wrote this not long ago.

So, in fact, philosophy has never been criticized as vehemently as by this public representative of philosophy. But the university professor Richard Wahle only rails against philosophy because, in his work of extracting the merely sensually perceptible, from which he has driven out all spirit, he has approached the spirit precisely through this negative approach. And certain things that characterize spiritual life are actually characterized better by no other contemporary philosopher than the spirit-despiser Richard Wahle. I would like to quote a passage from Richard Wahle's Mechanism of Soul Life, because it is interesting to see how a person who is driven by his acumen, in expelling the spirit, I would say, when he scurries out the window, is driven to perceive this spirit after all. One could say, as the poet says: The little people never feel the devil, even when he already has them by the collar. — But a person like Richard Wahle just about notices the spirit; that is why he says: "What a small space the spirit occupies in the universe! It is only like a puddle in which stars are reflected. If the combinations of the spirit formed a significant part of the world, it would have to be ashamed of them; that would compromise the universe. Isn't it strange that the universe is thought of as if our miserable spirit were at its pinnacle, when it would be better to forget about it altogether?"

This is the attitude that quite understandably arises when one approaches the spirit, which is the most valuable thing to human beings. There are many reasons why this is so; we will encounter them the day after tomorrow. But I also wanted to illustrate this fact to you with a remarkable phenomenon of the present day, namely the fact that, at the boundary between the sensory world and the spiritual world, we must overcome what initially holds people back with fear, and then even with hatred and aversion, from truly entering this spiritual world, which can be entered by the paths I have described in this lecture.

In addition – let me say this at the end today – many people who want to acknowledge the spirit are particularly satisfied when they can say: Yes, we admit that there is spirit; we admit that spirit exists in some way, because human beings always stand before something hidden, before something they cannot explore. And so people forgive you for talking about the spirit; but they do not forgive you for penetrating the spirit in such a way that you can describe concrete facts and beings from this spiritual life, as I have described some things today. For they do not want to hear that the immortal can really be explored, that the spirit cannot be presented merely as something inexplicable, but that by developing certain soul forces one can penetrate into this realm they call “unknown” and even, as we shall see the day after tomorrow, must penetrate if there is to be salvation in human life. One must penetrate it if one wants to assess such terrible catastrophes in the right way as signs of the times, such as the one that has now befallen humanity.

But all kinds of people refer to those who have devoted themselves to the spirit. And so we see that those who contribute most to through often quite astute investigations, to undermine the possibility of understanding spiritual science as it is meant here, that they refer precisely to a spirit whom I always like to mention when I want to cite a personality on whom is built what I have achieved in decades of my own spiritual research. I always want to point out that this spiritual research is not based on anything fantastical or dreamy, but on the sound foundations laid by Goethe's worldview.

Goethe himself was not yet a spiritual researcher; the time for spiritual research had not yet come. But anyone who, as I did in my early writings, delves deeply into Goethe's worldview will find in it the elementary starting points on which to build. And if one builds on these, one is led directly into further development, into what I call spiritual research, which leads to results such as those I have characterized today. Therefore, if it were up to me, I would call this spiritual research Goetheanism and the building in Dornach dedicated to it the Goetheanum.

It is not necessary for this to happen; but just as I am clear that what humanity must strive for in order to achieve its salvation will have to be built in the future on the foundations laid in human culture by Goetheanism, so I know that the current I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is the direct continuation of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis, and indeed of Goetheanism itself. And when some people refer to Goethe, who rejected the spirit and described everything as nature, it should be pointed out that Goethe, while still relatively young, in his famous prose hymn “To Nature” did indeed call the universe nature, but included the words: “she has thought and continues to ponder.” When one says that the world being thinks and ponders, one gives it not only an unconscious but a conscious spirit, one gives it conscious spirituality. Then there is no need to argue about words. Spiritual science is certainly not concerned with words. Whether one calls what is understood as the universe nature or spirit is not important, but rather that one understands it in its concreteness, in its uniqueness, in its inner nature. And here, too, one can agree with Goethe, one can agree with Goethe when he does not want to present the unfathomable merely as unfathomable, when he does not want to deprive human beings of the ability to penetrate the unfathomable. One need only point out what I pointed out here years ago: Goethe spoke out about this misunderstood Kantian principle of the unfathomable in nature to a researcher who otherwise had great merits, a great researcher. An important and great researcher said:

“Into the innermost depths of nature.
No creative spirit penetrates.
Blessed are those to whom it only
reveals its outer shell”

Goethe responds to this researcher and says:

”Into the innermost depths of nature—"
O you philistine!
“No creative spirit penetrates.”
You may remind me and my siblings
Of such words,
But not:
We think: place by place
We are inside.
“Blessed are those to whom
She shows only the outer shell!”
I have heard this repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but secretly;
Tell me a thousand thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly;
Nature has neither core
Nor shell,
She is everything at once;

Piece by piece, we are inside her. Nothing is inside, nothing is outside!

Examine yourself most of all,
Whether you are core or shell!

Goethe pointed out in a real spiritual reality that human beings can be the core of nature, that is, they can grasp themselves as spiritual beings in order to know themselves to be in harmony with the spiritual nature of the whole world.

To point this out in a spiritual reality is the task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, in order to give human beings the conviction that they are not merely spirit, but can recognize themselves as spirit and can live consciously in the spiritual world.

More on this the day after tomorrow.