The Essence of Anthroposophy

GA 80a — 19 November 1921, Berlin

Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy aims to lead human knowledge to those areas in which the great questions of life and soul lie, the questions that deal with human destiny on a large scale, with the question of the eternity of the human soul, with that which comes from the world beyond birth and death and has an effect on human life and so on. But this anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to conduct its research in complete harmony with the current spirit of science. If this scientific spirit still regards it today in many ways as the result of some kind of phantasms, then anthroposophy must believe that these things are still based on complete misunderstanding. But anthroposophy must go beyond the results that can be found today by recognized science. Nevertheless, anthroposophy has the greatest esteem and fullest recognition for modern science. Over the past three to four centuries, this natural science has achieved an incredible amount in the overall education of humanity. For anthroposophy, these achievements are primarily significant in terms of the state of mind that a person can achieve by fully penetrating the discipline of this scientific spirit and its research method, by permeating the attitude that prevails within this modern natural science.

I would like to say that modern natural science has actually only brought to light the full significance of what we call our sensory knowledge. And anyone who wants to speak — as is to be done this evening — of supersensible knowledge must, above all, be completely clear about the nature of sensory knowledge, without any dilettantism. By systematically applying the methods of observation, by developing the way experiments are conducted, and by mathematically and otherwise rationally treating observations and experiments, modern natural science has gradually raised itself to the ideal of arriving at something through the contemplation of the sensory world that something that approximates more and more to an objective reality, an objective reality into which nothing may be mixed from the subjective, personal arbitrariness of man, nothing from any phantasms or illusions. In this respect, supersensible knowledge must also emulate natural science.

If we use the human mind merely – and as mathematicians we do this particularly – to order and systematize the phenomena of the senses and thereby to divine their laws, then we gradually come to realize that the senses and their explanations are basically the great educators of the human mind, that mind which is nevertheless dependent in a certain respect on the inner organic constitution of the human being. We know how dependent we are — and modern science, physiology and pathology, can still substantiate this — in our judgments and in forming our ideas of what our physical and mental constitution is. But by devoting ourselves to sense perception in a scientific way, we are constantly compelled to rectify in an objective sense that which wants to leave us as illusions, as phantasms. This – I say this again – must absolutely be emulated by supersensible knowledge.

However, the modern scientific method comes up against a certain limit in its efforts to understand the external world, and important naturalists have clearly spoken about these “limits of natural knowledge” based on the nature of scientific knowledge. We cannot get beyond the order of sense phenomena. At the moment we want to go further, to go beyond the sensory tapestry that spreads around us through intellectual speculation, we must either state the limits of knowledge of nature, or we must, as it were, let go of the intellect and extend the concepts, speculate, build hypotheses into the void, into the indefinite. And there have been enough of these hypotheses. Many a person has cautiously tried to venture beyond the realm of sense perception with concepts and ideas. But in the end, all such efforts leave the person unsatisfied, for he can never give himself an explanation as to what justification there can be for extending the ideas gained from the sense world into the realm beyond the senses.

And so all philosophies and speculations that want to go beyond the sensory world are completely unsatisfactory for the serious thinker, especially for the thinker accustomed to scientific concepts, and we see the consequences of this in the various world view endeavors of the present. The human heart and soul cannot remain with what the external senses can tell it. The human soul knows that the merely temporary fate, which is bound to this sensory world from it, cannot affect its ultimate nature, and so deeper natures, more serious souls, often take refuge in all kinds of mystical endeavors.

These mystical endeavors are directed towards turning one's attention away from the external sense world, and also more or less away from the intellectualistic penetration of this sense world, and instead to look into the inner being of the human being. Just as it is impossible to arrive at a truly satisfactory understanding of the nature of the human soul through external natural science or through speculation based on it, so it is equally impossible to arrive at a satisfactory knowledge of the human soul through ordinary “mystical immersion”. For what does it profit us, no matter how much we develop this mystical absorption? What comes to the surface of our consciousness from the depths of the human soul? Some people may believe that they can exclude all subjective arbitrariness by quietly and meditatively devoting themselves to what an objective inner upwelling from the soul can tell us about our own human nature.

But anyone who can truly dissect the human soul, who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, and who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, will ultimately always discover that the mystic, who often believes he has found his divine origin, something eternal, in his own soul, is ultimately dealing with nothing other than reminiscences of experiences to which the human being was exposed, especially in those times of childhood when one is not yet fully aware of the relationship between the human being and the outside world. And if, in addition, one is able, through a sound knowledge of the human soul, to see how the inner state of mind, what one might call a certain inner pleasure, or also all kinds of inner fears, can cloud one's judgment of the mystical content and make it appear as something quite different from what it is, then one becomes particularly cautious in this area. An everyday experience over many years can metamorphose in the soul so that a trivial experience can emerge from the soul decades later as something connected with the ground of the world. He who knows how not only the soul-condition, which is after all more easily observed, affects man's general feeling, but even the human organism, he alone can see clearly in this field, and he will come to reject much mystical striving, which is taken seriously from this or that side. Whoever can analyze the human soul will see the reasons for some doubtfulness, for some skepticism, which appear as a world view, but in a disturbed digestion, and will have to look for the reasons for some mystical ecstasy in organic excitement, sometimes of a very questionable nature.

In short, anyone seeking serious anthroposophical spiritual science must avoid the two pitfalls: the limited natural science on the one hand and the mysticism that lives so richly in illusions on the other. He must seek a sure method, one that is modeled on the certainty of natural science, imbued with the same attitude with which one lives as a scientist when experimenting in the laboratory or studying physiology or pathology at the dissecting table. Not only must anthroposophy arrive at different results from those of recognized science, but it must also develop its own method.

Now you will understand that in this short lecture one evening, I can only give you guidelines, just a few suggestions, regarding the results of this anthroposophical spiritual science, as well as its method and evidence. I will be able to show how the evidence is found. But what I am thinking of giving a brief outline of here is already the subject of a great deal of literature, and so in the context of a lecture I can only make suggestions, not present anything conclusive.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must go beyond the ordinary scientific method! Why is science limited? Why does mysticism not lead to the real core of human nature? Because both natural science and mysticism are limited to those cognitive abilities that a person develops in normal life, whether through natural growth, organic development, or the education that is common today. Thus we only develop the scientific method. Anthroposophy must now draw attention to the fact that the human being can become aware of other abilities that lie deeper in his soul, that lie dormant in this soul for ordinary life and for ordinary science, and that he can also consciously apply such abilities to genuine scientific knowledge. In order to develop these abilities, however, we should not resort to some kind of mystic darkness, but we should start from what is available in ordinary science and in ordinary human life.

Here we have what mysticism presents to us with so many illusions: the human capacity for memory at the one limit of our ordinary pole. This capacity for memory is, of course, entirely dependent on the organic constitution of the human being. Yet it is this capacity for memory that gives us, as human beings, our coherent consciousness, our coherent self. One need only think of the terrible mental state of those people in whom the continuous memory into childhood is clouded. There are conditions in which long periods of time are missing from the memory. Such people have, so to speak, pushed a part of their own soul life out of themselves. They no longer feel and experience their whole being. They show us how important coherent memory is for a healthy soul life. What is the nature of this memory? It consists in our being able to conjure up images in our consciousness of experiences we have had in our ordinary life between birth and the present moment. We carry images within us that we can conjure up before our soul in our ordinary life, more or less faithfully. The anthroposophical method initially ties in with this soul ability and, by transforming this ability to remember, trains so-called imaginative knowledge. This is not a sum of imaginations, of illusions, but something that can be gained through strict inner self-education alone and that corresponds to an objectivity, albeit a spiritual objectivity, just as the memory corresponds to an objectivity, not to mere fantasy. I will briefly indicate the principle of how to arrive at this first step of supersensible knowledge, at imaginative knowledge.

The point is to allow representations to be present in one's consciousness in a manner similar to that which otherwise obtains in memory. However, since we are not dealing with training but with a transformation of the ability to remember, these must not be images that one simply retrieves from the treasure trove of one's memories. Such images are, after all, modified by the emotional life and even by the organic constitution of the person, and a person can never know what is being conjured up when he simply allows memories to be present in his consciousness.

In order to bring about what I would call meditation — I have called it that in my writings — either you have to have some kind of idea of an experienced anthroposophist , or one must try to form an idea or a complex of ideas oneself that is easily comprehensible, that one can survey, as for example a triangle in geometry can be surveyed, where one can be quite certain: what is present in consciousness is all that is present. Nothing from the world of the emotions, from the constitution of the organs, comes up; you really have everything in view.

But it is not the content that is important, but rather that the soul now draws together all its powers to allow this content to be present in its consciousness for a shorter or longer while – some need a longer time for this, others a shorter time, it depends on the disposition of the person –. For what matters is the development of these forces slumbering in the soul, not what we bring into our consciousness in the form of thoughts, but what we do with what we have thought about. If, by way of comparison, we exert our arm muscles particularly through some kind of work, they become stronger and stronger, developing more and more strength. This physical strength develops through work and practice. It is exactly the same when, after years of practice, we make ideas present in our consciousness in the way indicated and then hold them in our consciousness for some time. What the soul has to do here strengthens the soul forces that one does not have in ordinary life.

I would like to make it very clear that what I have described here is easy to explain but difficult to carry out. It is no easier to make progress in the methods of spiritual science than in the methods of a laboratory or an observatory. Of course, there are people who are particularly predisposed to developing such inner soul powers; they may make very rapid progress. But in general, without needing a lot of time every day (each individual exercise can be short; its effect depends on the power of the exercise, not on the length of time, which only puts one to sleep), one needs repetition , repetitive practice, to finally get to the point of noticing something very specific in oneself; namely, that one has brought something out of the depths of one's soul that one previously did not use either for ordinary life or for ordinary science. To make ourselves understood, I would like to use a comparison.

We remember ourselves as human beings with an ordinary consciousness up to a certain point in our childhood. What lies before this point eludes ordinary memory. Why is that? Well, during this time, what the child experiences psychically works through impressions of the outside world, through combinations of the outside world and through the penetration of the emotional side of his soul with will impulses. This is not yet working with the ideas that only emerge with the development of speech. Rather, what the child ignites in the outside world is imprinted in the still plastic, malleable brain, and it is an interesting study to see how malleable a child's physical brain is, how resiliently it develops according to what the child experiences in the outside world. But it can also be said that this physical human brain stiffens, and precisely at the moment when it has stiffened particularly, the formation of the brain stops, and those forces are released that used to work on the brain. They now provide the child's imaginative life. This is mainly sparked by language. The human being continues to develop this, and through careful education he or she continues to develop what he or she is able to produce through the formation of his or her brain in the first years of life.

In a wonderful intuition, a man like Jean Paul spoke of education in such a way that he said: Man learns more in the first three years of life than later in three academic years. Actually, this is absolutely true, because in the first three years of life our organism is formed, and we can basically shape and be shaped in our whole later education only in the sense that our physical brain is formed in the very first years of life.

With these abilities, which develop in this way, the human being today stops both in accepted science and in ordinary life. The anthroposophical method would now like to take up in a higher sense — which again is not for physical education, but for soul education — what has been achieved for the human organization in the first years of childhood. If we carry out such meditations as I have suggested, and allow the images to be present in our consciousness for a sufficiently long time, depending on our individual abilities, we will notice that something similar to what happened in early childhood now occurs, and this occurs in the full consciousness something similar to what happened in early childhood, only that in a properly guided meditation one does not intervene in the physical organization, but in the finer organization that underlies the physical organism and that is only now being discovered.

In the course of meditation, one must absolutely come to it, after first honestly admitting to one's imagination: there you have the limits of your knowledge. So you have to be able to stand there quite honestly on the ground of scientific research and say to yourself, in the sense of a du Bois-Reymond, who in the early seventies of the nineteenth century gave his famous lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” in Leipzig. For ordinary thinking, there are limits to knowledge that cannot be transcended. But if you live this meditative life, you will find that, just as a child, through development, weaves itself deeper and deeper into the outer secrets of the world, certain limits are now practically overcome. You can then honestly admit to yourself: Before, you had these limits because you did not use certain abilities. Now you have developed these abilities and can cross these boundaries. In this way, anthroposophy transforms knowledge, which is otherwise only an intellectual-formal one, into a practical one. Before certain boundaries of knowledge are crossed, the ability to cross them and, above all, the consciousness that can understand inwardly is first developed: Now you are capable of something different than you were before.

And it is particularly the one inner experience that one has: as one advances in meditation, one comes to realize that, without perceiving with the senses, one enters into an inner activity that proceeds with the same vividness with which a sensory perception proceeds. What one experiences inwardly in meditation are images, such images that are more vivid than the memories, as vivid as the sensory perceptions, but do not have the same content as the sensory perceptions. Just as one otherwise experiences only when one sees colors with one's eyes and hears sounds with one's ears, whereas mere imagining, even remembering, is something pale, so one experiences something new with the same input through the whole person, as one also otherwise experiences with the whole person in sensory perception: a world of imaginations that is there for consciousness, that was not there before, a thoroughly new world. And we have conquered the objectivity of this world by making the efforts I have mentioned.

I could not go into this in detail, only hint at the principle. In some of my writings — for example, in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and also in the second part of “Occult Science, an Outline of Its Methods” — you will find the details of this meditative practice described. Here it is sufficient to have hinted at the principle by which one comes to imaginative knowledge.

When speaking of this imaginative knowledge to those who today often believe that they are fully grounded in a scientific attitude, they say: It may seem to be laboriously acquired, but it is nothing more than something acquired through autosuggestion, something that, just like any visions or hallucinations, is brought up from repressed nervous strength to the surface of consciousness. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that what anthroposophy develops in this way is quite the opposite of the pathological experiences of the soul, of illusion, hallucination or mediumship. One need only be reminded of one thing: anyone who, for example, examines what I have written about meditation exercises in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' will see that particular care is taken to maintain the soul life of the human being completely healthy and intact alongside the development of this higher knowledge, that is, let us say, of the imaginative life. In the case of a diseased soul life, the diseased soul life drowns out the healthy one, as it were extinguishing it. In the case of the soul life that is sought for the purpose of higher knowledge of anthroposophy, the healthy soul life remains completely intact alongside what is now also sought as imagination. Imagination appears as something quite different from ordinary mental life, but at no moment is the person who has attained it in a different inner state of mind, so that all his other memories and insights remain healthy alongside the imagination.

Imagination, as I said, is transformed memory. This is also expressed in its very essence. Some beginners on this path develop this imagination. They are then delighted when they have arrived at the first elementary results, that they can develop a pictorial, objectively given life of ideas that now already, at least suggestively, points them to a supersensible world. But they lose it again. This is due to the essential nature of imaginative cognition, as well as that of all higher knowledge. The knowledge that we otherwise acquire in the external world through ordinary consciousness leads to memory; we can bring it forth again from memory. What arises in the imaginative life is there, alive, like a sense experience, like sounds or colors. But it does not imprint itself on memory. This is precisely what surprises the beginner the most. He believes that he can have a supersensible insight and that he can carry it with him through life like an ordinary memory. Just as we, when we have looked at a color, then turn away from it and no longer have it, so we no longer have the supersensible experience if we have forgotten it in our soul. All this must be taken into account. Anyone who speaks about this supersensible world never speaks from memory; he speaks from an immediate experience of the supersensible world.

Let me make a brief personal comment. Even when one gives a lecture such as today's, in which one speaks about the supersensible world in an orienting way, one does not prepare for it in the same way as for other lectures on knowledge. Rather, one has to direct one's preparation in such a way that one's organism and soul life are enabled to let the supersensible knowledge approach them.

For if I have a supersensible insight today, as soon as I have had it I forget it, and if I want to have it again, I have to bring it about again. I cannot simply remember it; I can only bring about what I did in meditation and concentration to bring about that supersensible experience at the time.

So already in the imagination, the supersensible worlds are such that they do not imprint themselves on memory. Why is that? The reason for this is that supersensible knowledge, as it is meant here, is not something formal at all, but, in contrast, really brings about the supersensible world for us. We can recall knowledge that merely gives us images of the external material world over and over again. Once we have acquired them, it is good to be able to recall them from memory. This kind of knowledge is based only on pictorial processes, on mirroring processes in relation to the external world. It is basically not a sum of real processes. Real processes take place in such a way that they are subject to repetition, to rhythmic repetition, not to memory.

It is a very trivial but accurate statement when I say that our organism needs food. What we take in as food is processed by it in some way that does not need to be explained further here. But once it has been processed, the corresponding process is over, so to speak. But the next day we must eat again, and no one can claim that he ate yesterday; nor will he. We are not dealing with a formal process of reflection, but with a real process. Such real processes are those that occur in the supersensible knowledge meant here. What has once been brought about as the content of the soul must be brought about again and again by taking the same measures again. One can remember the measures that formed the preparation for certain supersensible experiences at the time. But only by taking the same measures can one arrive at the same results.

Once you have entered this imaginative world, however, you are fully aware that you once had a world of imaginations. The way you experience these imaginations is an inner grasping of the whole human being. But you also know that you have not grasped an external world with consciousness, but that you have actually only brought up from your own inner being everything that you have brought out of consciousness. A hallucinator who surrenders to some kind of vision mistakes the images that arise in his mind for reality. Someone who lives in the imagination and is trained in anthroposophy knows that at first he has only himself in the imagination. There is already a certain development of strength in this awareness of having only oneself, because everything that arises in the form of vivid images, as vivid as any external sensory perception, tempts one to mistake it for an external world. It is also objective, but our own objective inner world. One must apply a certain inner power of consciousness in order to become fully aware that you are dealing with your own inner being.

But this imagination can progress to the point where you really only get this own inner being in front of you, and in such a way that you now, with the help of this imaginative knowledge, have the first, albeit now — I would like to say — subjective-objective supersensible experience. That one has something like a tableau of one's life — I cannot say spatial, nor temporal, it is something temporal-spatial, something where one has something temporal before one, but as if quite side by side — that one has such a tableau of one's life before one, one that extends back to the vicinity of one's birth, that one has gone through oneself in this earthly life up to the moment of one's birth. (This is what appears before the soul in such a temporal-spatial image.) At the same time, one can see what has happened to us over the course of a long time. Otherwise, memory is such that one or the other emerges from the stream of experiences. But now, not as a memory, but as an image, and indeed as an inner, thoroughly worked through image, one has one's entire life before one, as it is described by people who study nature and who are conscientious enough in such matters that one can recognize it as truth. Just as someone who is about to drown sees his life before him in a clear way, so the person who has advanced to imaginative knowledge in this way has his life before him in a clear tableau.

This is the first experience one has. It is the kind of experience that can already lead one to see that The person who presents himself as a spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense must also get to know all the inner experiences that accompany such supersensible experiences. What he shares serves to strengthen and calm life. It gives life security and shows the eternal essence of the human being, as we shall see. But the research and the experience itself is something that not every person would desire from the outset. One must already have developed a full and healthy soul life, for which the books mentioned above give comprehensive instructions, in order to be able to face what is necessary to understand and receive messages about the supersensible world, but is also necessary for research in these areas, with an open mind and strength.

The vision of this tableau of life gives rise to an inner experience that I would call “oppressive”; something like an anxiety attack settles over life. And herein lies progress: that the anthroposophical researcher confronts and overcomes these things with strong soul power, that he has first developed a healthy soul life to such an extent that he can endure in a healthy way what he encounters as side effects of knowing the supersensible worlds. Further progress lies in the development of such powers. For this must indeed go so far that the human being not only transforms the faculty of memory, as I have described, in order to attain imaginative knowledge. Rather, further progress consists in developing the art of forgetting, the suppression of perceptions, and in this suppression of perceptions, to the point where one can now suppress the entire life tableau, removing it from consciousness. One develops this artful forgetting by repeatedly and completely arbitrarily removing the manageable ideas described, after having allowed them to be present in one's consciousness, while they actually want to occupy our consciousness. While a person who merely surrenders to his nature develops the tendency to hold on to these images, someone who wants to become a true spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense must develop the ability to suppress these images with full awareness of will and to make the consciousness completely empty without — allow me this remark — falling asleep in the process. Most people, when they want to empty their consciousness, are only able to doze off gently. But that is what the spiritual scientific researcher must develop with all his strength, indeed with increased strength: to bring ideas into his consciousness and then to bring them out again, so that he is able to remain with an empty consciousness, for a shorter or longer period of time.

The significance of the anthroposophical method is that one must bring the will into the whole life of imagination, that one lets ideas be present in consciousness in a completely manageable way, conjures them out of consciousness again, and thus pushes the will into imagining, into forming thoughts. While otherwise one develops one's thoughts only in the continuous outer life, passively devoted to it, one has now, for some time, gained an inner strength from suppressing perceptions. When one has transformed one's forgetting in this way, one is then able to extinguish the entire life tableau, so that one no longer merely removes a single image from one's consciousness, but the entire inner life that has arisen before the soul from birth to this moment like a tableau. One feels oppressed when faced with this tableau because now one is not just confronted with pictorial representations as usual, but with forces that are themselves inner pictorial representations. One experiences that by grasping this tableau of life, one has grasped not just something intellectual and formal, but the same forces that are our inner forces of growth. One beholds what has shaped the organism since childhood as formative forces or, if I may say so, as purely etheric forces. What has shaped us is what one first calls into consciousness and what one now brings out of consciousness again.

Once this has been achieved, the next step is the other stage of supersensible knowledge, which I have called inspired knowledge in my books. This is not meant in any old superstitious way, but only in the sense in which I describe it. This inspiration consists in clearing away what has arisen in the previous way, in bringing about the conditions that empty the consciousness. But consciousness does not remain empty. Because we have had the formative forces of the human being in consciousness – the forces that develop the liver, lungs, heart and so on, we perceive this in them – and by now removing these forces from consciousness, it does not remain empty. Rather, what now arises in consciousness is a real spiritual life, a real supersensible world. For in that we remove these formative forces from our consciousness, we take leave, as it were, as we otherwise take leave of an experience, initially for the moment of realization, so to speak, of the outer sense world with which the life experiences are connected that are reflected in the life tableau. We are in a different world at this moment. We are in the world in which not only the forces that have been forming us since birth lie, but which have formed us before birth or conception.

We now become aware, through developed knowledge, that before we, as spiritual beings, incorporated what the inheritance of the physical-material world can give us, were in another, spiritual world from which we descended and incorporated ourselves into what, materially, surrounds us like an outer covering, like an outer instrument during physical life on earth. In this way, through a real practice of knowledge, we come to perceive what cannot be perceived by the ordinary powers of knowledge. We come to perceive a world even when we have taken leave of the sensory world in the way described. We perceive a human power of being when we have not only extinguished the view for the sensory world, but have also extinguished our experiences with the life tableau just described. But for one who has thus attained knowledge, a healthy soul condition always remains. He who ascends to inspired knowledge in this way is never in a position to have something within him, as in the case of the hallucinator or the psychopath, that extinguishes his healthy soul life and takes its place. And just as in the imagination, the healthy soul life stands alongside the imagination, so it is now that there is a rhythmic alternation: prenatal life, life in the spiritual-soul, then the human being who stands here on earth on his two legs and thinks with us. And we swing back and forth in rhythm, in rhythm between the supersensible and the sensual world. We breathe in, we breathe out. It is almost experienced: what we were before we integrated ourselves into the earthly world, and we live back to what we are as earthly human beings. We experience a rhythm like the rhythm of breathing. And if all rhythms in the world are related, one rhythm is always the image of the other, then at least in the breathing rhythm something can be seen that forms an analogy to what I have just described as a rhythm. Therefore, there is a method that is no longer useful for Westerners today: the ancient Indian yoga method, which also speaks of these things. But it is no longer useful for today's people because they cannot do ordinary yoga exercises like the ancient Indian or the modern Indian, but the Westerner needs exercises today as I described them.

But how are the yoga exercises performed? It is briefly stated here for clarification. The yogi devotes himself not to unconscious breathing, but to a regulated, conscious breathing process. He consciously experiences what otherwise occurs unconsciously. In this way, he lives into the rhythm of the world through an altered, regulated breathing process and in a corresponding inhalation and exhalation. And in fact, through his special constitution, he is able to see the supersensible life before birth when he performs his exercises for a long time, where it sometimes appears as a spiritual soul, the other time here in earthly life. One sees that there is already an authorization through the analogy to speak of “breathing” here. For just as we draw in our breath and then push it out again, so the physical part of man, given by the material current of heredity, unites with the spiritual-soul, breathing into it, as it were. The breath lasts only as long as one earth-life. And in the same way, at death, the spiritual-soul is breathed out again.

This process of birth and death is what is now, in the process of realization, being recreated by the inspired realization. However strange and paradoxical it may sound, what is otherwise only experienced once in the process of being born and dying, this uniting of the physical body with the spiritual-soul, and then the emergence of the spiritual-soul, is what is formed in the imitation of knowledge, which is anthroposophical knowledge. In this way, not through speculation, not through philosophy, nor through some kind of mysticism, which can only be based on illusions, but through a real practice of knowledge, one enters into the experience of the world in which man was before birth and in which he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. It is certainly still strange for modern man when, as for example in “Occult Science: An Outline”, the worlds that man experiences before birth and after death are described in such detail, as are otherwise described by the naturalist, the botanist, mineralogist or geologist, the details of plant life or other things in our sensual world. But humanity will have to get used to the idea that it is possible to make people aware of their inner powers, their formative powers, which are soul-imbuing powers, but which are already supersensible sense powers — let me use the paradoxical word — and which therefore bring the human being as a spiritual-soul being into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual-soul worlds, by which he is surrounded before birth and after death.

It is not logical reasoning that underlies the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here when speaking of supersensible worlds, when speaking of the eternal nature of man, but a leading of practical knowledge to the of that in the human being which is truly of a spiritual-soul nature, which is creative, not created by the organism, which transforms the organism of its own accord and thus has the guarantee of eternity, of passing through birth and death. It is only the unusual nature of such a method of knowledge that still gives rise to the many misunderstandings surrounding anthroposophical spiritual science today. And it is perfectly understandable that even well-meaning scientists, when they set out to study what anthroposophy offers and what is so rigorously described as a genuine method of knowledge, as is usually the case with mathematics, for example, first create a and then, when they do not understand it, they say: This is nothing more than a sum of illusions, hallucinations and fantasies, when they first present their distorted image and then criticize their own construct. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, if anthroposophy were what some of today's scholars make of it, then I would criticize it much more severely and much more disparagingly than some scholars do. But anthroposophy is developing the healthy paths in the face of all the pathological paths attributed to it by those who misunderstand its methods. But I don't want to dwell on the many misunderstandings, I just want to draw attention to one more.

It is indeed the case that the practical powers of knowledge that I have described are strengthened by everything one goes through. At first, one has gained strength by letting one's life tableau sink, but then it is filled with a spiritual power. Now the researcher is faced with a new experience, which many are unconsciously afraid of and for which reason they would not even want to approach this spiritual knowledge if they were to become acquainted with it. Anyone who views the spiritual world in this way, as I have described it, actually feels something like a painful deprivation in his soul throughout the time that he has exposed his consciousness to this spiritual world. If it is not experienced with a fully healthy soul, it can give rise to a very pessimistic view of life. However, since all preparation in anthroposophy must be undertaken in such a way that the human being is thoroughly healthy in his soul, he knows that he would say of this pessimism, which lies before his soul if he were to surrender to it, The whole world is permeated with pain and sighs in pain. But this pessimism arises as something that belongs to the necessities of the world. One experiences it, one experiences something quite painful, while one is devoted to the supersensible world in inspiration.

But why do we experience this pain? One realizes that this pain is only the repetition of that painful longing which forms the power of the soul, through which the soul feels drawn from spiritual-soul worlds into material physical embodiment. This longing of the soul must be relived in knowledge at precisely this stage. And what appears in the pessimists as world-weariness is a ray of this feeling that reaches only into the consciousness of imagination. It is felt in a very different way by those who want to attain supersensible knowledge, and who, when they have reached the highest degree of supersensible knowledge, experience it as a kind of life-weariness. We must indeed be clear about the fact that the seeking of knowledge cannot always be a pleasurable matter. Anyone who has attained a few, perhaps modest, extrasensory insights or even real, true insights into life will always say: “I gratefully accept from the Powers that Be the good fortune I have experienced. But the painful experiences and bitterness I have gone through have been a good preparation for me to reach the state of mind that really leads to a deeper understanding of the secrets of life. Therefore, even the most ordinary painful experiences are a good preparation, if they are lived through in good health and one does not allow oneself to be completely depressed by them, also physically, for what one has to experience as a side effect of inspired knowledge. But through everything one goes through, one now comes to carry that imagination, which is immediately lost to man when he descends into the emotional life or into his own will, into all that I have described as being above the sensual world.

That is the essential thing, that one does not surrender to nebulous soul content, but that one takes with one on the entire further path what one has first developed in the imagination as a strong pictorial image. Our emotional life rises, like dreams, from dark depths of the soul. We become aware of our feelings in our imagination. As people of the present day, we can only truly live in our imagination when we are actually awake. Our emotional life always has something dream-like about it in comparison to our imaginative life. And our life of will is usually dormant even during the day. We do perceive that we move our arms through our will, for example. But what lives in him as volitional forces is actually just as hidden from him as what he experiences in his soul from falling asleep to waking up. Thus, for the ordinary state of mind with the emotional life, we get a dreamy element into life, but with our life of will, we even get a sleeping one.

It is interesting to see how psychologists such as Theodor Ziehen struggle with the fact that in ordinary life, experiences of the will are only present in the imagination. But with the soul life that I have just described, the human being takes his life of ideas everywhere with him and permeates it with fully conscious will. Just as he otherwise combines the individual ideas in fully conscious judgment, willfully, so he pursues everything I have just described — although it may seem paradoxical to some — through anthroposophical knowledge with a fully conscious, alert life of ideas. As a result, he ultimately develops an inner strength that does not cause him to lose his self within the enriched inner life, but on the contrary, allows him to see his self in a form that is never presented in ordinary consciousness. This is because our ordinary consciousness is guided inwardly in such a way that we look at the same thing and designate it with the word “I”. But if we can see what is expressed in this little word “I”, we are aware that it is based on a reality, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not have this reality.

When we say “I am”, we are actually pointing to something that we only have as an image, just as we only have our impulses of will as images. For this I points deep down into the sleeping depths of the soul and of organic life in general, where the sleeping will is also rooted. Only an image rises up. But now we have descended down there ourselves, now we have carried our consciousness down to the reality of consciousness through supersensible knowledge of imagination and inspiration, now our true being has been given to us in a third stage of supersensible knowledge: In intuition — whereby this word is not used in its usual sense, but rather to refer to that which can be based on the two other preliminary stages — in this intuitive consciousness, the idea of repeated earthly lives takes on meaning. Through inspired realization, one looks back at the spiritual and soul life before birth. In this self-knowledge, which appears as intuition, one sees one's self in that enriched form in which it is not exhausted in one earth life, but in which it brings the results of earlier earth lives over into the present one, and in which it shows the results of this life as the foundations for later earth lives.

I just wanted to briefly explain that when the anthroposophical spiritual researcher speaks of repeated earthly lives, it is not a hypothetical way of talking, but rather a very systematic search for those powers of knowledge that lead people beyond the ordinary sense world. This systematic search now also leads them to recognize repeated earthly lives. But with that, he also sees through how what appears as a necessary fate and places us in a certain way in life is connected with these repeated earth lives, while everything that develops as our ordinary, conscious thinking between birth and death is precisely the basis of the human freedom developed in this earth life. At this level of knowledge, one gains an understanding of how that which is necessary in us, which constitutes our destiny, is connected with our repeated lives on earth. In contrast, in the individual life on earth, through his fully developed individual, personal thinking, which breaks away from repeated lives on earth and develops personally in the individual life, the human being places himself as a free being precisely in that life on earth. That is why the person speaking to you today not only developed anthroposophy, but also wrote his “Philosophy of Freedom” as early as the beginning of the 1890s, in which he examines the real foundations of human freedom. The necessity in which man is placed through repeated earthly lives is built on what lies below the threshold of what flows from our free thoughts. A “philosophy of freedom” is entirely compatible with anthroposophical spiritual science.

In this lecture, I have only been able to sketch out the guidelines needed to gain an orientation in anthroposophical spiritual science. Anything beyond the scope of this lecture must be sought in the relevant literature. In conclusion, I would just like to hint at a few points concerning the impact of anthroposophy on the individual sciences.

Through the kind of insight that is gained through imaginative knowledge, one gets to know the whole of the human formative forces. One is then able to get to know not only what human formation is on the dissection table through autopsy, and thereby establish physiology, therapy and pathology, but also how one learns through ordinary knowledge how the mathematical dominates the outer world. In this way, one comes to know the qualitative aspect of external beings through an inner realization, through a realization that is inspired like mathematics, only that it is qualitative, not only quantitative and formal like mathematics, but immersed in the reality of beings. In this way, one comes to know the human being inwardly. And in the moment when one comes to the inner formative forces of the human being — in that tableau as I have described it — one also gets to know the inner formative forces of mineral, plant and animal beings and the formative forces of the world. This then opens our eyes to the sense of belonging that is found in everything that is spread out in nature, in the inner formative forces of the human being and in their consequences in the human organs.

One gets to know the organs of the human being in both a healthy and diseased state. Anyone who, with this knowledge, observes the human heart, for example, knows that a heart is not just a form that can be grasped in an external view, but that the heart process is one that can only be understood from the knowledge of the whole human being, because otherwise one would only view it one-sidedly. It is similar to the magnetic needle, which one also looks at one-sidedly if one were to say of it: It points its one tip to the north, the other to the south. No, to explain the magnet needle, we use the whole Earth and say: the Earth's North Pole attracts one half of the magnet needle through its forces, the South Pole the other. But especially with humans, we only want to look at what lies within the skin, individually. But even with humans, we have to go beyond what lies within the skin, just as we go beyond the magnet needle itself. You have to know the whole person if you want to study both the healthy and the sick person. Spiritual science opens up the possibility of this, and we have been able to develop a medicine based on anthroposophical spiritual science. In Stuttgart, there is also a medical-therapeutic institute among the “Kommenden Tages” institutions, with doctors who work with the whole of anthroposophy. I myself was able to hold two medical courses for doctors and show what anthroposophy is capable of achieving by adding what underlies the spiritual entity of the sensory world to the other, and how it can thus enrich a science that is merely regarded as empirical, such as medicine. Contemporary humanity will have to become accustomed to the idea that reality is not only material but also imbued with spirituality.

Just as medicine can be enriched by anthroposophy, so can, for example, external social life, as can other sciences. We have already tried to provide practical proof of this in one area in particular, namely in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which is intended to be a comprehensive school in the best sense of the word and is headed by me. This Waldorf School does not practice any kind of worldview in the anthroposophical sense; only those who want to create all kinds of misunderstandings about anthroposophy say that. In this Waldorf school, the human being is educated and taught on the basis of real knowledge of the human being, including the child, which not only looks at the human being's exterior and puts it into pedagogical, didactic and so on formulas; but on the basis of real knowledge of the child, so that the person who is a teacher at this school must above all observe what is working its way to the surface in the child's body, soul and spiritually, and what is working its way through the features and speech, through thinking, feeling and will, so that with an eye trained by anthroposophy in this respect, the teacher can educate the person in such a way that the education itself is an organic one, through what he encounters from week to week, even from day to day, in the developing human being. Nowadays, education in most cases proceeds in such a way that we are taught certain things in childhood, some of them quite well. This is not to decry the existing education system, but it must be said that in the developing human being, some things are brought up that are introduced to the child with far too sharply defined contours, and then later do not develop further with the human being, but simply remain in him. In contrast to this, the method of the Waldorf school is to give the child ideas, feelings and impulses of will, without claiming that they will remain by definition as the child receives them, but that they are transmitted to him in an entirely organic way, that is, in moving contours, so that what the child receives as instruction is itself something that grows, just as the child's limbs themselves grow.

In this way, the various areas of social life can be modeled on the processes of the world, those world processes that are not only permeated by matter but also by spirit. And it seemed to me a significant achievement that at the last congress of the Anthroposophical Movement in Stuttgart (from August 28 to September 7, 1921), Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand, a Waldorf school teacher, was able to give a lecture on the topic “Against Experimental Psychology and Experimental Pedagogy”. I do not wish to say anything here against the great merits of experimental psychology and pedagogy. But precisely when one recognizes such merits, one cannot ignore how, in the fields of pedagogy and psychology, the human being has actually become inwardly alien to the human being, and thus also to the child. One must first experiment externally, how the human being perceives, how he retains things, because one is not inwardly connected to the child. An important lecture was delivered by Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand at the Stuttgart Congress, and deserves to be known everywhere. Emil Leinhas gave another lecture that should also be made known. In it he characterized present-day political economy with all its contradictions. This lecture could be a real breakthrough for a renewal of the scientific and practical treatment of the social question, to be drawn from spiritual science, as I have tried to present it myself in my “Key Points of the Social Question” from the necessities of life in the present and the near future.

Thus, through what it attains in direct spiritual vision, spiritual science can not only give man certainty about his eternal essence and thus give him an inner center that he needs if he is not to become unfit for life through perceiving, for example, his supposed nothingness, but anthroposophy can generally fertilize life very much, just as it can penetrate art. Goethe said, in that he sensed such things from his comprehensive world view — I tried to show this in the 1880s in my Goethe writings, from which it can be seen how anthroposophy can also emerge from Goethe's world view, you just have to take it further. At one point, Goethe said that art is based on a certain manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never become apparent without it. Or at another point he once said: He to whom nature reveals its secret is longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. And when he traveled in Italy, he wrote to his friends in Weimar after seeing artistic creations that particularly interested him: “The great works of art, as the greatest works of nature, are produced by people according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.

And: “I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of.

But we can only see this creative power of nature if we behold the spiritual that lies behind the sensual facts and natural essences through anthroposophical knowledge. Therefore, what confronts us sensually in art, but in such a way that the sensual always speaks to our spirit and soul, can be thoroughly fertilized through imaginative and inspired beholding. Only those who have no inkling of spiritual science as it is meant here, but have only ordinary intellectual knowledge in mind, talk about the fact that one can only come to a straw-like allegorical art through creation from the spirit. But you will find nothing allegorical or symbolic, for example, in the School of Spiritual Science building in Dornach, which was built there for anthroposophical spiritual science and which was created in all its forms from the vision of the spiritual world, from the vision of of forms and color harmonies that can be so secretly interwoven into the outer material that what is fulfilled is what Goethe expressed with the words: Art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it. — So art too can be fertilized by anthroposophy.

And in eurythmy, we are now bringing an art of human movement to the world that has already been widely studied, in which what is inside the human being in terms of measure, harmony, meaning and inner stylization is brought out and expressed in the movement of individuals or groups of people, so that not just mimic dances are created, but something completely different, something that is a real visible language and therefore expresses the inner soul life as necessarily as audible language or singing.

And religious life must also be enriched by leading man up into those supersensible worlds in which he must have the home of his spirit and soul, especially for religious feeling. It is therefore actually grotesque when, in a recent publication dealing with religious experiments in the present day, and including a section on anthroposophy, which does not in any way seek to found a religion but, as I have described today, — as I have described it today — scientific knowledge, when it is judged in such a way that one says: the truly religious person could not actually tolerate it, because it is a rival to religion, it could perhaps even become a substitute for religion. A substitute for religion — the most terrible of horrors! The person appointed to officially care for religious life today already thinks about anthroposophy in a very economic and commercial way. A competitor is emerging for him, and he continues to speak from the feeling of the competitor: “The creation of anthroposophy means the death of religion.”

Now, dear audience, one should indeed believe with a sound mind and a straight mind that precisely religious life could feel encouraged by the fact that a science that takes it as strictly as any other scientific knowledge opens up the supersensible worlds to human observation in such a way that the presentation given by a spiritual researcher can also be understood by the non-researcher. For this can be the case with spiritual science, which, in addition to material knowledge, simply brings the knowledge of the spiritual life that permeates the material processes of the world. But today there is already some fear of this knowledge. A philosopher who is highly regarded today once said a few years ago: He wanted to talk about the relationship between the spirit and the body of man. One could do that, because one need not know the spirit or the body, but only study the relationship between the two. To illustrate this, he then told a parable, saying, speaking to his audience, I do not need to know each and every one of you and be introduced to each one individually, but there is a certain relationship between us even without us knowing each other. Just by being in the same room, there is a certain relationship between you and me.

So, today in the circles where one talks about world view, one is afraid of a real spiritual knowledge, but one needs this knowledge if one wants to talk about spirit and body, because one has talked oneself so much into an agnostic way of knowing that only wants to see limits everywhere, and one does not want to develop the practice of knowledge that goes beyond the limits of knowledge.

Of course, spiritual science has to be slowly developed, like any other science. But the practice is such that, like the other sciences, it leads into the existence of nature. And spiritual science does not lead people into a dreamed-up cloud-cuckoo-land, but into the real spiritual world. Therefore, it permeates the material world with spiritual impulses that can enable people to intervene in all material circumstances, so that they do not become brooders about the spiritual life, but rather people who are imbued with real spiritual activity and can thus recognize and work in the great world. For only he is truly cognizant who does not dream himself away into a cloud-cuckoo-land, but who is aware that the spirit must intervene practically and creatively in material life through man. In this sense, anthroposophy does not make people impractical, but rather practical for ordinary life on earth, placing them in their duties and in the ordinary tasks of life. It prepares them for eternity, but it prepares them in such a way that they can carry the eternal into the temporal. It does not reject the honest study of material phenomena and material entities, but seeks the spirit that permeates matter everywhere. It seeks the spiritual above all in human knowledge itself, thereby freeing knowledge, which otherwise can only slavishly attach itself to the material world, and thereby creating such impulses for action that the human being can practically intervene in life. Therefore, it can be said of anthroposophy that it at least strives to spiritualize matter through the human being itself, but that the human being does not lose himself in the context of material processes, but that he can find himself through free knowledge as a free human being in the whole scope of life.