# The Essence of Anthroposophy

## GA 80a — 17 January 1922, Stuttgart

### Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the Soul

Dear attendees! Man only really faces the riddles of existence when he has developed a degree of awareness of life, when he is compelled to form ideas, sensations and feelings about his relationship to the world. But then, when he has reached such a situation, the riddles of existence mean to him what can be called a vital question. For they are not only connected with some theoretical longings, they are not merely external questions of education, but the whole position of man in the world depends on them, the way in which man can find his way in the world, the degree of security he can have in life, and the inner support with which he can move through this life.

But there is a considerable difference between the various types of existential conundrums. Man is confronted with nature and must form ideas and feelings about his relationship to nature. And if I may use a comparison, I would like to say: When man has come to consciousness in the way I have characterized it, and he cannot find his way into certain things that confront him as mysteries of nature, then existence, to which he once belonged – as I said, it is only expressed as a comparison – appears to him as a spiritual darkness. He feels as if he has been placed in a dark world, and cannot find his way about in it. But to a certain extent this whole relationship to the secrets of the outer, natural world remains something external to the human being; it concerns his outer relationship to existence.

But the situation for the human being is quite different when it comes to the riddles of his soul, these riddle questions themselves. He lives in these riddle questions, these riddle questions basically constitute what can be mental health and illness in the first instance, but what can also become physical health and illness. Because, ladies and gentlemen, the life of the soul is something extraordinarily complicated, however simple it may initially appear. What we carry in our consciousness during our waking hours from morning to evening is, as is now also scientifically recognized, only part of our soul life. A large part of our soul life rests in unconscious or, as I could also say, subconscious depths, and it surges up in the form of vague feelings, of vague moods, and also of all kinds of other soul content, and forms what is an indeterminate basic state of our soul life. But that which takes place and rises in this more or less indeterminate way in the depths of our soul life is intimately connected with what actually constitutes the happiness or suffering of our lives. And anyone who attempts to penetrate the soul life of a human being by anthroposophical means will very soon notice how everything that flows up from the depths of the soul in this kind of indeterminate way with the physical body, how at first quietly, then more and more, our entire state of health, which makes us capable of living or unable to live, can depend on these subconscious soul moods.

Now I do not want to speak to you today, my dear audience, in the way that this unconsciousness of the soul is very often spoken about at present, by placing everything that shimmers unclearly in consciousness in this great container of this unconscious and forming more or less vague ideas about how this unconscious or subconscious works. I have been speaking here in this place about questions of anthroposophical research for many years and therefore cannot start from the most elementary of this research today, but would like to consider the questions of the soul life in their very own sense, as they are connected in a certain sense with the happiness and unhappiness of life. But to do that, we have to look at what, in the human soul, permeated by all kinds of things that are initially unknown, which we just want to point out more or less clearly through today's reflections, can have a disturbing or calming, happy or sorrowful effect in this soul life, and what lies in between.

Now, if we take a glance, even a superficial one, at our soul life, we find two clearly distinguishable poles: on the one hand, the life of the imagination, which actually encompasses everything that takes place clearly and brightly in our consciousness. And on the other hand, we find the life of the will, which initially plays out from the depths of the soul in a somewhat dark, gloomy way.

As I have mentioned here before, we distinguish between two states of consciousness in the ordinary course of a person's life, of which only one is actually a distinct state of consciousness. We distinguish between the waking state and the sleeping state. In the state of sleep, the conscious life of imagination ceases, the whole life of the soul sinks down into a more or less dark darkness. But if we look at our soul life quite impartially when we are awake, we can actually only speak of the fact that in relation to everything that is conceptual, we are really awake. To a certain extent, we have ourselves in our hands as waking human beings, insofar as we have filled our consciousness with clear images, with thoughts full of light. We also accompany our will impulses, we accompany our actions with thoughts. But even with the simplest movement of the human body, how the thought of consciousness is connected with what actually happens during a will impulse, during an action, remains completely dark. How dark it is, what actually happens inside the arm when I just lift this arm, when the thought that has the goal of lifting this arm wants to realize itself, wants to shoot into it, so to speak, and wants to set the arm in motion willfully.

What happens in our own organism eludes our waking consciousness just as much as what actually happens in the human soul from falling asleep to waking up, so that we actually have to say: It is the case for the human soul life that even when we are awake we have an element of sleep, that the state of being asleep pervades us continually, and that we are fully awake only in thinking, in the experience of clear, light-filled thoughts. Between these two states, between the — I would like to say — fully waking state of imagination and the life of will immersed in darkness, lies, participating in both, the life of feeling and of the mind. Our feelings permeate our ideas. We bring certain sympathies and antipathies from our feelings into the life of our ideas, and thus we usually either connect or separate our ideas. We accompany what flows into our will impulses with our emotional judgment, in that we perceive some actions as being in accordance with duty and others as transgressions against duty. And because we experience a certain emotional satisfaction when we fulfill our duties, or a certain dissatisfaction when we fail at something, or when we cannot succeed at something, or when we fail at something for some other reason, our emotional life flows back and forth between our mental and our volitional life.

But the real soul mysteries do not present themselves to the dull person who, in the manner just described, devotes himself to the life of ideas on the one hand and to the life of feeling and the life of will on the other, but these soul mysteries emerge as the person becomes more and more conscious of himself. And even then the actual experienced soul mysteries do not occur in full consciousness, but they belong precisely to the more or less subconscious experiences of the human being. Man never becomes completely clear in his consciousness about what actually influences the mood, the states of his soul life, his daily happiness, his daily suffering, where these actually come from.

And one must seek out and clearly express that which lives unclearly in consciousness, and I ask you to take this into account in the remarks that I am about to make, that I will be obliged to express in clear words something that express in clear words what never lives in consciousness with such clarity, but what is present in the life of the soul, either healing or causing illness, and what the human being senses without being able to bring it to consciousness. And because this is so, the soul puzzles are not merely theoretical, they are thoroughly existential puzzles that are experienced.

When a person lives, as it were, according to the life of imagination, then he feels – as I said, I am speaking clearly about what is only felt unclearly, what is never fully brought to consciousness – then the person feels something like the vanity of his own existence. The life of imagination is a life of images. The life of imagination is something that we fill during our waking day-to-day life with what we receive from the outer world in the way of impressions and perceptions. What we experience from nature forms the content of our imagination; it lives in us and is what we draw from our memories. But although we are aware that Yes, you are active in processing these experiences into representations. You are inwardly active in separating and connecting representations, but you are not fully aware of this activity in your mind. What is present in your mind is basically a reflection of the outer world. We know that we have to align our imaginative life with this external world. What we have is merely a reflection of the external world. We live by living in our imaginations, in images. We do not feel a full sense of existence in our imaginative life.

And this feeling, it lives out subconsciously, however strange, however paradoxical that may sound. And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings, in feelings of fear, in relation to the life of imagination.

It sounds paradoxical, dear audience, but there is an undercurrent to the life of the human soul. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or all people in fact, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is a fearful current, that we can, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of ideas is a world of images. And again, the indefinite longing lives in the human soul: How do I find existence in this mere world of images?

This unconscious feeling in the undercurrent of the soul can certainly be compared to the feeling that a person has when they are physically short of air, when they suffer from air hunger and thus consciously fall into anxious feelings. What a person consciously experiences through physical conditions is actually always unconsciously felt as a concomitant of the life of the imagination. And so, on the one hand, we can point to a soul enigma, not in a theoretical formulation, but by bringing up from the depths of the soul what is germinating or slumbering in this soul.

And on the other hand, by living towards the element of will, the human being feels — I would say — the opposite state. There is a different undercurrent in the life of the soul. The human being senses how he is exposed to his drives, his emotions, his instincts, how something natural plays into the human soul life that does not open up to the clarity of thinking, that is always immersed in a certain way in a reality that we cannot penetrate with light, that forms a darkness within ourselves. And if you can penetrate into these undercurrents of the soul with unbiased observation, you can indicate how that which exists in the depths of the soul is unconsciously felt. One must then characterize it by saying: It is felt in the same way as anger is felt in consciousness, or also how a person feels when he cannot breathe, when his blood circulation is disturbed in such a way that the inhaled air is not properly converted in his body, when a kind of suffocation sets in. Something like anger-fortitude is always there in the human soul as a result of such a way of living towards the element of the will.

These are forces that live deep in the unconscious of the human soul, that flood up and that constitute the real mystery of the human soul life. And the one who merely takes the ideas in their pictorialness, the will in its instinctuality, as they present themselves to consciousness, does feel these soul riddles as something indeterminate, as an indeterminate sensation of the soul, but he does not make these soul riddles clear to himself. He does not really know what the indeterminate workings in him are, but they deeply influence his happy or unhappy mood in life.

It must be said again and again: the soul puzzles are not the same as those we experience in nature; the soul puzzles are those that are experienced inwardly, that flood up from the deep undercurrents of the soul and that must first be interpreted. Therefore, my dear audience, every scientific discipline – against which, of course, as has been emphasized here many times before, I have no objection in its legitimate field – therefore every scientific discipline has little to do with the actual riddles of the soul. We can see this, and I would like to give two examples. We can see it in all of modern scientific thinking, how helpless science, which celebrates such great triumphs in other fields, is when it comes to the soul, despite the fact that the greatest existential riddles are connected to the human soul. I would like to recall two examples, which, however, are deeply significant for what is there and for what is scientifically necessary in order to penetrate into the actual field that man experiences as a soul riddle.

It is now almost half a century since the great physiologist du Bois-Reymond gave a speech at the 45th Naturalists' Conference in Leipzig that must always be referred to, despite the fact that it has been talked about an extraordinary amount and has now almost been forgotten and disappeared from the discussion. This speech was about the “limits of knowledge of nature”, and du Bois-Reymond rightly states on the one hand, the limits of knowledge of nature, the material world in its essence. He says: Wherever matter comes into play, the human mind cannot penetrate. It penetrates from the external observation of the external sensory phenomena to the revelation of material existence, but it cannot specify what matter itself actually is. This is the one limit du Bois-Reymond indicates. He indicates the other limit as that of human consciousness, but today this is nothing other than the human soul. He says: Even with the most complete knowledge of nature, one cannot even gain any idea of how the simplest sensation comes about in the human soul. Even if one knew quite clearly how carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen atoms move in the human brain, one would never be able to fathom from a clear insight into these movements how the simplest sensation – “I see red”, “I smell the scent of roses” – comes about, that is, how the first elements of mental life come about.

And du Bois-Reymond is actually completely right in this statement. There is a second limit for external natural science here, except that du Bois-Reymond's conviction is the one that must be overcome through anthroposophical research. Du Bois-Reymond believes that the limits of knowledge of nature are the limits of all science. Therefore, he says: If you want to penetrate into this realm of the spiritual and soul, you have to do it by means other than scientific ones. Because where supernaturalism begins, where, in other words, one enters the realm of the spiritual and soul, that is where science ends. This is precisely what anthroposophical research wants to defend before the world: that science does not have to be limited to the external-natural existence, that science can develop the means to penetrate into the spiritual-mental as well.

The other example I want to give is that of an excellent personality, Franz Brentano, who wanted to establish a psychology entirely according to the method of modern natural science. That was his ideal. I have — dear ladies and gentlemen — discussed the whole state of affairs underlying Franz Brentano's research in detail in the third part of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (On the Riddle of the Soul) and would like to mention only a few fundamental points here. Franz Brentano then tried, at the beginning of the 1870s, to write a psychology, a psychology. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. The second volume was promised for the fall; it never appeared. The whole work was intended to be in four volumes; except for the first volume, nothing ever appeared except individual attempts, which, however, are always only attempts. The whole work remained a torso. In the work mentioned, I have discussed why this had to be so. Franz Brentano wanted to conduct research into the life of the soul in the same way as in the natural sciences, and in this first volume one finds a remarkable confession by Franz Brentano. He says, for example: With this scientific research, it is indeed possible to modestly find one's way in the details of mental life. One can indicate how one representation connects with another, how one representation separates from another, how certain feelings attach to representations, how volitional impulses attach to representations, how memory works, and so on. But if, as Franz Brentano says, we have to content ourselves with investigating only these details of mental life, and if knowledge of the most important questions of human existence has to be bought at the price of this strict scientific method, where would that leave us? For Brentano finds justified the longing, already present in Plato, in Aristotle, in ancient Greece, to lead what can be investigated in the individual soul to the great questions from birth to immortality. And it would be sad, says Franz Brentano, if, in the desire to be scientific in the exploration of the soul life, one had to renounce knowledge of what happens to the better part of man in us when the physical part is handed over to the earth at death.

And it is evident from what Franz Brentano has expounded in the first volume of his psychology that his whole scientific yearning is to lead the individual questions, which basically can touch the wider public little, which this wants to leave to the scholar, but to lead these individual questions on a long path to the great questions of human immortality and the divine-spiritual content of the world, as it is reflected in the soul. But Brentano could not find this way out of his scientific way of thinking, and because he was an honest researcher, he left the following volumes, for which he could not find a research path, unwritten until his death a few years ago.

I would like to say that it is precisely this researcher's fate that shows in the truest sense how tragic it is that what is often recognized today as the only scientific approach must falter when faced with the great riddles of the human soul. That is it – I must say it again – that Anthroposophy must defend before the world today: that the path that Brentano could not find out of natural science, out of mere natural science, can be found, dear ladies and gentlemen! And it can be found if we do not stop at the ordinary abilities of the soul, as they present themselves in the outer life and as they are used in ordinary science.

I have often spoken of the fact that there are dormant, let us say with a scientific term, latent cognitive abilities in every human soul that must first be brought up out of this soul, just as certain abilities must be brought up out of the child through external education. Once a person has matured to the point where they have developed ordinary cognitive abilities, they must undergo such an inner education through devotional inner soul exercises. In this way he can develop those abilities in the soul through which it is no longer unclear what I have characterized on both sides as human, enigmatic soul experience; the experience in relation to the ideas, the experience in relation to the will impulses, so that, as it were, the human soul process becomes transparent, so that one can penetrate into what is actually going on in the human life of ideas and the human life of will. For without penetrating into these everyday soul puzzles, one cannot find the way to the great questions of immortal existence and the divine-spiritual content of the world, in which the human soul also originates.

Now, in my lectures here, I have often described how a person can do inner exercises, purely soul and spiritual exercises, through which he awakens the otherwise dormant cognitive abilities to existence, so that they can really help him in his knowledge. I have pointed out how one can strengthen one's own imaginative life. Just as we strengthen a muscle when we use it continually in work, so we can strengthen our imaginative life when we work at it in the way I have described in detail, for example, in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds.” If we direct this life of imagination through inner, soul work in a certain direction, if we move certain easily comprehensible images into the center of consciousness and always devote ourselves to this kind of imaginative work, to which we would otherwise not devote ourselves. I can only hint at this in principle here, but you will find clear indications in the work just mentioned and also in the second part of my “Occult Science” that the imaginative life of the human being can become something quite different through such meditation and concentration exercises of thinking. I would like to say that a stronger, more vigorous life of imagination can be produced without any kind of abnormal action, but through the mere further development of what is normal in the life of thought, in the life of imagination in man. And by generating this stronger imaginative life, by elevating ourselves through meditation and concentration above that which is actually merely pictorial in our ordinary imaginative life, we come to what I call in the books mentioned, the imaginative presentation that is rich in content.

This imaginative presentation, lives with such an inner liveliness in the mere thought, as otherwise the human being lives in his outer perceptions. But through this — my dear audience — one gradually comes to the point where the life of presentation is no longer this merely abstract, this — I would say — merely pictorial, but through purely inner research, which is, however, pursued with the same seriousness as any other kind of scientific research, through inner research one makes the discovery that the soul, which otherwise could only fill its mental life with the results of external impressions, that the soul is inwardly filled by forces that, as it were, shoot into the soul life. The images are no longer just this light liquid when they are formed through meditation and concentration, but they are permeated and imbued with forces that I would call formative forces, forces that make up an inwardly spiritual-plastic element. And after some time, one discovers that through this development of the life of imagination, one grows together with that which the formative forces of the human body itself are. After some time, one discovers that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the rarefied life of forces in human growth. That which inwardly shapes us plastically in the physical body from birth to death is – I would say – in a rarefied state our life of imagination in ordinary consciousness.

We look at the newly born child. We know, dear listeners, that in this newly born child, the formative forces are at work in the brain, shaping the body. We follow the growth of the child, how it radiates straight from the plastic brain activity, we follow it to a certain point in human life, until the teeth change, until around the age of seven. We will, by feeling this life of strength that pulsates in man, that is vividly active in him, by feeling this first as something indefinite. We will, on the other hand, by powerfully developing our life of imagination through meditation and concentration, be unconsciously led to the same element that worked so vividly in us from our earliest childhood. And this is a significant discovery of the inner human life: that one can strengthen one's imagination in such a way that one can make it so intense inwardly that one then feels oneself in that which is the formative forces of the human being, which formative forces are in one's growth, in one's metabolism. However strange it may still sound to today's research. It is the case that it is possible, by strengthening the soul life, to grow into that which then, in a sense, takes us up as that which plastically shapes our outer physical body as its formative forces. One grows through the life of the imagination into reality, one grows into a formative element. And in this way one gets to know – dear ladies and gentlemen – what lies behind the mere thought process. One learns to recognize how a spiritual, with which one has now connected, works on the human organism from birth to death. The life of the imagination acquires its reality, the life of the imagination is no longer the mere life of the image, the life of the imagination becomes a life of strength that is inherent in existence itself.

And only through such an insight can that which - one could say - the undercurrent of anxiety, of fear, produces in the human soul, can this fear, this anxiety, be overcome from consciousness, so that it is indeed not a theoretical solution to the riddles of the soul that anthroposophy points to here, but a thoroughly inward, practical solution that can be experienced. Anthroposophy must point out that, as a result of its research, human consciousness can be opened to an understanding of what lives in the human being, which — I would like to say — only appears to be so diluted that it emerges as our ordinary life of imagination, but which, in truth, is the inner sphere of growth of our existence. And on the other hand, when a person loses their center of gravity in their mental life and gets caught up in a fearful undercurrent of their soul life, they can absorb the results of spiritual science anthroposophy about the mental life and can maintain this mental life through the path of knowledge. Anthroposophy does not offer a solution to this soul riddle by putting forward a theory, but by putting forward a result that the human being can fully grasp with his or her common sense and that then — by lending heaviness — occurs in the life of ideas for his consciousness, for his soul life, so that into the soul mood, into the soul condition, solving riddles can flow that which Anthroposophy seemingly asserts as mere knowledge of the life of ideas. On the one hand, we recognize how the human being is a formed being, how he appears as a whole in a certain form, how his individual organs are formed out of the spirit and how we, in order to be free beings, can act not only through these inner forces but can also surrender to free mirror images, how we can develop our mere pictorial representations into a plastic form.

What is presented here, I have - my dear audience - explained in the early 1890s of the last century in my “Philosophy of Freedom” by showing that man is a free being precisely because he can live in pure thoughts that are not related to any external reality for his consciousness, that he can shape his moral impulses in these pure thoughts. One is faced with the fact that one must carry out something oneself if one's mirror image is to change; mirror images do not determine one causally. One would never become free if one were determined by a reality in one's ordinary consciousness. In one's ordinary consciousness, ideas live as images. One is not determined by them, just as one is not determined by mirror images. One is free. In order for him to be free, his life must be distinguished from that which permeates it plastically as a growth force, as a growth body – one could say – as a body of formative forces. But the human being must pay for this life in freedom with the characterized anxious undercurrent in his soul life. And so, in his ordinary consciousness, the human being must come to fully experience his sense of freedom, but also, as a polar opposite, be able to contrast this experience of freedom with what anthroposophy can give as a way of strengthening the life of ideas in the manner indicated.

But if we continue along this path, we move from what I would call the very rarefied, purely pictorial life of ideas to that which is real, which lives and forms in the human being. It is not the physical body, it is not the physical organs, it is a supersensible force, but it is there. One grasps something that lies outside the physical body. And one can penetrate into it by simply pursuing the riddles of the soul on one side; one can penetrate into that which, independently of the human physical body, has a supersensible reality in man. One advances to what, through birth or through conception, let us say, as a human physical body, is prepared by mere hereditary relationships, by mere external natural facts, what is preformed as a human body. One learns to recognize how the inherited traits, which come from parents or ancestors, connect with the whole body, which is formed in the maternal organism, from the spiritual world, and how one finds this again in life when one strengthens one's imaginative life. One arrives – I would say – at one side of the question of immortality. We look at what is immortal, what is eternal in human nature, because it penetrates from a spiritual world through conception and birth into what is humanly physical, and because it continues to have an effect even during earthly life as the inner, plastic formative power with which we connect by strengthening our thought life in the manner indicated.

Thus, dear attendees, anthroposophy offers the perspective that someone like Franz Brentano was looking for. Brentano also began with an investigation of thoughts, but he left thoughts as they are in ordinary consciousness. He limited himself to merely registering what is present in ordinary consciousness. Only the strengthening of the thought life through meditation and concentration leads this thought life to the inner, plastic formative power. And it really leads to the path that begins with the simple, everyday thought and ends with the spiritual-soul element of the human being that lived there before birth, before conception, in the spiritual-soul world itself and that connected with the powers of inheritance, with the physical powers of the human body. There is no other way to solve the riddle of the soul than to find this path from the simplest phenomena of everyday life to the great riddles of existence.

I have — my dear audience — so far pointed to what man can achieve in relation to his thought life. There he comes to that which, as it were, drives man out into space, which plastically permeates the spatial corporeality of man, which lives itself out in the form, which descends from the spiritual world, as I have indicated, and flows into the outer form of man, and also into the form of his inner organs. But that is only one side of human life. And the soul also participates in the other side of human life, if we can also develop the life of thought through meditation and concentration. If we do not develop the life of will on the other side in such a way that one can say in the proper sense that it is strengthened, but rather develop it in such a way that we make it more devoted, more spiritualized.

This can be achieved by, in a sense, tearing ourselves away from our everyday life of will. I have again given many individual exercises that would have to be practised for years — spiritual science is no easier than research in an observatory or in a clinic —. But I would like to pick out a few individual exercises to indicate the principles involved. When we consider what functions as will in ordinary thinking — for there is always a will present in thinking, thoughts are shaped by the will, the thought-life is only one side of it, in the life of the soul will is always interwoven with thoughts and thoughts with the will. When the will element that lives in the thoughts is thereby torn away from its usual course, which adheres to external physical facts, for example, by presenting something backwards, let us say. While one is accustomed to presenting a drama from the first to the fifth act, we present this drama backwards, from the last events to the beginning. Then one proceeds to presenting external facts backwards. For example, one can imagine one's usual daily life in reverse, proceeding in as small portions as possible, from evening to morning, even to the extent of imagining going up a staircase in reverse, imagining it as going down backwards from the top step to the penultimate step and so on.

Because we are accustomed to always thinking in the same sense as the external facts unfold, thinking actually plays a passive role for us in relation to the will that unfolds in it. It becomes actively inwardly active, permeated with inward initiative, when we train it through such exercises as retrospection, where we tear it away from the course of external facts and make it rely on itself. For when we reinforce what we achieve in this way through careful and energetic exercises with truly serious self-observation, observing what we do as a person of will as if we were standing next to us and observing ourselves piece by piece in our development of will; or also when we would go over to action, when we do exercises for the purpose of making a resolution and then executing it with iron energy, so that we live completely in the element of will. I just wanted to mention in principle such exercises that not only tear the will away from external facts, but also from its and its being to the body itself, which make the will independent, spiritualize it - then we actually come to a development of the will in this way, so that we experience ourselves with our soul life, which now develops the will, outside of our body. It is a significant experience.

But only through this does one begin to understand what the will is. In ordinary life, the will is bound to the organs. We see it unfold as we move our limbs. We observe, as it were, only through our thought life the processes, the effects of our will. We see into it when we have torn it away from the body, when we experience it in itself, becoming completely one with it. Then it is permeated by an elevation of the power that is otherwise also bound to our physical organism, permeated by the power of love. And that devoted element in the life of the soul is developed into a transparent, bright clarity, which otherwise — I would like to say — appears to us darkly as the emotional life of the will in love.

I know how little people today want to accept love as a force of knowledge. In ordinary life it is not. But when it is developed in such a way that the will is no longer rooted in instincts, in drives, in emotions, but in the pure soul, apart from the body, then this will is actually only understood in terms of its essence. And then it shows itself to be something quite different from what the thought element has shown itself to be. The thought element, in its intensified form, has shown itself to be that which shapes constructively, which — I would say — allows an organ to flow out, which culminates in human reproduction. The thought element unfolds as the plastic activity, from the soul into the human body. The will element unfolds in such a way that – especially when it is recognized separately from the body – one can then see how it affects the body. It unfolds in the body in such a way that it does not shape the physical in a plastic way, but the plastic-shaped is regressed, dissolved, atomized, made to flow. The will element is what constantly — I would like to say, I beg you not to misunderstand me — what constantly, the expression is meant figuratively, but it means something very important, what constantly burns the formed elements of the human being again, lets them rise in flames — spiritually speaking.

Human life, as it pours out of the soul into the physical body, can only be understood by looking at it, on the one hand, as this plastic element and, on the other hand, as the re-dissolving of the plastic element, as that — I would like to say — into the atomized, into the dissolving of the plastic element. And in that everything that unfolds as will in the human being is such a dissolving, atomizing, and melting element in the human body, this will-like element is what is now experienced as pointing the way to the other side of human life, pointing the way to death.

In the same way that we first get to know the spiritual-plastic element of the human soul through the plasticity of thinking, which enters the physical body through birth or conception, we learn to recognize how the will-like element dissolves the human body, but in the dissolution – I would like to say, as I said, figuratively speaking – pure spirituality emerges from the flame. We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we understand death as a result of the dissolution of the will element. We understand what happens to a person in death because we understand what happens in the everyday act of will. Everyday volitional decision brings about a kind of combustion process in the physical body, but from this combustion process emerges that which is our inner soul life. What we feel inwardly as soul could not be there if we were always merely bodies, merely shaped in a plastic way. The plastic must be broken down, flow, and from the flowing of the plastic, from the continually being destroyed of the bodily, the experiencing of the soul arises. And we understand the departure of the human soul with death from the physical body, which only in an instant summarizes what is always unfolding in the will to the spirituality of the soul. Just as I experience my will in the present moment, how it forms a kind of process of combustion, of dissolution in the body, how through this destruction the spiritual comes to life in the human body, so I learn to recognize how, with the other destruction of the body in death, which is nothing other than the last effect of the will hidden in the body, how the spiritual returns again to the spiritual-soul world.

This is the living teaching of Anthroposophy that leads to the riddle of the soul. Anthroposophy is not a theory; it certainly wants to give knowledge, but not a theoretical knowledge, it wants to give a knowledge that is soul food. And in this way it can present the individual daily experiences of the soul being before the spiritual eye. From these individual experiences, it can then move on to the big questions of the soul's life.

Dear attendees, allow me to elaborate on this one detail so that you can see what anthroposophy is based on to guide people into the riddles of the soul. Allow me to give you the details of human memory.

Once you have developed the intensified life of imagination that I have characterized, and once you have also become familiar with how the plastic is continually being broken down by the life of will, then you can also see the inner soul processes with transparent clarity. One sees how the human being faces the outer world, how he receives his impressions from the outer world, how he then forms ideas, thoughts about these outer impressions, how he then after some time – or even after a long time – brings up these ideas as memories from certain sources, or how they also arise by themselves – as one says today – as freely rising memory ideas.

For anyone who wants to look at the human soul with an open mind, the mere emergence of these recollected images heralds a significant mystery of the soul. It can be said that, in a rather curious way, people have spoken of what the essence of memory actually is. They have imagined – and sometimes still do today – that: Well, a person receives impressions through perception, they are evoked by his senses, then they are continued through his nervous system, he transforms them through his imagination. These images then plunge into certain depths of his soul life and then come up again when they are remembered. Now, no person who thinks impartially can form any clear idea about how these images, when we do not have them, are supposed to go for a walk down there in unknown depths of the soul's life, only to come up again when they are needed, either through arbitrariness or because they want to lean against something that appears as a new perception, as a new impression of the outside world.

Anthroposophy goes beyond this to the real, true observation of the human soul life itself. It sees through the intensified life of imagination and the spiritualized life of will, it sees through the whole process that takes place from the perception of the external thing through the formation of imagination, through the formation of memory, to the re-emergence of the remembered imaginations. One would like to say: in that anthroposophical research penetrates to the forces of knowledge through such a shaping of the life of imagination and will — as I have indicated — the whole soul and bodily process, the way these two interact with each other, is transformed in such a way that, if I may compare it, something that I have before me as something very dark and opaque is suddenly made transparent by being illuminated. The whole human soul process becomes transparent through this strengthened life of imagination and spiritualized life of will.

And what do we now see in relation to what I have indicated? My dear audience, we see how external impressions stretch for miles through the senses, how the whole process continues, and how, in fact, what I have described as the formative, plastic element of the thought life, of the intensified thought life, how that works in the ordinary process of perception as a continuation. I perceive outwardly, but it is not only the abstract thoughts that I have in ordinary consciousness that work in me, but also that which is merely fathomed by spiritual science, that works continually. This plasticity in these representations has an effect down into the depths of the human soul and body. And then, when this has happened, when the thought has had a formative effect in the depths of the soul and body, then the person moves on to something else. A volitional decision is at work, the will is at play, but the spiritualized will is present. In that part of the human being that is connected to the outer brain, this will unfolds. It breaks down what is there for the ordinary consciousness by dissolving the plasticity of the brain, it breaks down what the impression has built up, so that we have an outer brain surface – if I may express myself crudely – spread over substrates, but where the plasticity continues to have an effect.

Now let us assume that I remember something in an arbitrary way, then it happens in such a way that I unfold this will out of a certain series of images. The development of the will is in turn connected with a breakdown, if external impressions do not now penetrate again, and the fact that these do not come is ensured by the development of the will, which is a breakdown. And this dismantling allows that which is in the subsoil to emerge as a sculpture of the human being when the memory is voluntarily recalled. If free-rising images come up, it happens the other way around. There is some external impression present that forms into a thought. The thought is vividly active. It is imprinted on the brain. This plastic activity is similar to the plastic activity that once developed in the substrate that which can live in the substrate in a certain form. This lives in the plastic activity that the thought has now formed.

In short, as you can see, the life of the soul becomes transparent in this way. You learn to recognize it in its inner plastic structure, in its continuous extinguishing, burning away through the will element. And by learning to understand every single moment of life, one learns to grasp in these currents of life what the great questions of life are. One learns to recognize from the thoughts that which enters into physical life through birth, and one learns to recognize from the will that which moves out into the spiritual world through the death of the human being. In this way, the results of anthroposophical research emerge as something that penetrates from the details of life to the enigmatic essence of the human soul.

In this way, my dear audience, by recognizing how thought already works vividly in ordinary memory, as if something is being formed in the body. In memory, we also experience how that which is not yet in the body, but connects with the body through birth and conception, how that intervenes in the body in a plastic way. We get to know the human life element in this plastic formation because we get to know the individual plastic element that already appears in the formation of memory.

Anthroposophy wants to look at the riddles of the soul with a full life! This should be understood as the essential thing about anthroposophical research: that it stops everywhere at the scientific conscientiousness to which one has been trained today by the great, powerful advances of external natural science, but that, by stopping at this conscientiousness, it simultaneously goes beyond what mere external observation and mere external experiment can offer, that it progresses from the abilities which, precisely by their special presence, make the human soul a mysterious being for the human being himself, that through the development of these abilities it leads to the soul's riddles being solved not theoretically but practically.

There is no need to fear, dear attendees, that someone who is on the point of view of such a so-called solution of the soul's riddle questions might one day want to present it as a finished thing, as a completed realization of what solves the soul's riddle, so that the soul could then fall into inertia towards its own life, into carelessness. No, my dear audience, the soul poses the riddles that I have presented today as the living, as the experienced soul riddles, the soul poses these riddles in every moment of life, and in every moment of life we need the results of spiritual research anew, which have a balancing effect on that which arises so mysteriously from the dark depths of the soul. What I have called the anxious current of human soul life, what I have called the wrathful undercurrent of human soul life, is nothing other than the inner call of the human soul not to take itself for granted, but to take itself in full, continuous experience, to take itself in such a way that this human soul is constantly a mystery to itself, that it constantly needs the solution to this mystery.

And it is precisely this kind of ongoing solution to the mystery of the soul that anthroposophical research seeks to offer, linking to the reality of existence in such a way that one can say – if I may use a trivial comparison – Just as a person in their physical life is a being that must constantly take in nourishment, that cannot be satisfied with a single intake of nourishment because it consumes this nourishment, because it connects this nourishment with its life process, so it is also with what is offered to us by anthroposophy as the result of the riddle of the soul. Its intense inner effectiveness eludes us if we do not continually contemplate it, if we do not continually progress. Because we are dealing with a reality in this area – not with a theory that can be learned and memorized, as with the reality of nourishing oneself – we are dealing with something that must penetrate the continuous process of life through anthroposophy.

And it is indeed so - the human being will become aware of the following, especially when he deals with the results of anthroposophy in relation to his own soul puzzles: Learning – dear attendees – however strange it may sound, it is a truth that anyone who deals with anthroposophy can experience, especially with regard to the riddles of the soul. Basically, you cannot learn anthroposophy. You can let its results approach you, you can read books, listen to lectures. But if you do not continually experience what you have absorbed in this way, if you do not connect it with the human soul in an ongoing process — as you continually connect the physical substances of the external world with the physical processes through the process of nutrition and metabolism — if one does not connect with the soul processes that which is presented in anthroposophy, one will see that it loses its significance for the soul, just as the physical loses its significance for the body if it is not continually introduced into this body. And just as hunger and thirst express the absence of physical nourishment, so does a being that is anxious and pathologically irascible, emerging from the depths of the soul, express what needs to be influenced by a real knowledge of the spiritual significance of the life of imagination and will. And if a person advances by always being able to cultivate in his consciousness, as a nourishment for his soul, what anthroposophical research gives him, then he finds what he needs to balance his soul life, what he must feel and experience as a continuous, living solution to the continuously living riddles of the soul.

And it must be said again and again: Anthroposophy does not depend on this – although by allowing and examining what is set out in the books mentioned, one can set out on the path of independent anthroposophical research – that every person can verify through anthroposophy what is presented in anthroposophy. Even if you don't do that, you can still use your common sense to find what is in anthroposophy. Without becoming an anthroposophical researcher, a person can use their common sense to follow what the anthroposophical researcher claims. But apart from this common sense, a person has something else. Even if he is a layman in the fields of physiology or biology, he does not know the chemical composition of the food he eats, but he tests what the food really is for the human being by consuming it and combining the forces with the forces of his bodily processes. In this way, he can unite the results that anthroposophy offers him, the way it shows how to solve the soul's riddles, with his soul life, and he will find that it satisfies him emotionally.

And what are soul riddles in front of this anthroposophical forum? Soul riddles, grasped in their liveliness, are nothing other than the expression of soul-spiritual hunger and thirst. And the solution to the soul riddle is basically nothing other than the assimilation of true spiritual content, true spiritual beings, which unite with the human spirit and with the human soul life. And so, I would say, spiritual saturation, which must continually repeat itself, is the solution to the riddle of the soul. The more vividly one grasps the process and the more one realizes how anthroposophy seeks to reach into every aspect of practical life, how it seeks to take root in the most mundane things and reach up to the great riddle of existence by introducing man to the divine spiritual source of existence, by leading him to his immortal self, the more one will realize that anthroposophy cannot be theory, but something that can be experienced. R

From this point of view, dear ladies and gentlemen, anthroposophy tries to have an effect on the most diverse practical areas of life. From this point of view, it has tried to shape what I have often discussed here as the founding of our Waldorf School by Emil Molt, what is being attempted in the practical social field.

Anthroposophy, as you can see, solves the riddle of the soul by addressing the whole living human being, body, soul and spirit. In doing so, it overcomes the one-sidedness of the knowledge and soul life that would necessarily arise with the fully recognized results of modern natural science in their field, which is also seen as a triumph of anthroposophy.

However, ladies and gentlemen, people would take note of this and would pay attention if anthroposophy were not so misunderstood, as happened, for example, during the past summer here in Stuttgart at the Anthroposophical Congress, where Dr. von Heydebrand, in a lecture that was also printed, presented the one-sidedness of mere external experimental psychology, based on Waldorf education. Not because opposition should be taken against this experimental psychology – it will be possible to appreciate it in its own right and its results in the right way in its own field if, on the other hand, what is explored so externally can be permeated with what can be achieved spiritually and soulfully by anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy comprehends that which works out of spiritual-soul worlds into the physical body of the human being; this is comprehended.

But in this way all outward research can be enlivened, education can be enlivened, medicine can be enlivened – this too has been dealt with in earlier lectures here – and social life can be enlivened.

Here, too, I would like to point to a fine example in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the above-mentioned congress, which is also printed here and which explains what economics, which has arisen from merely imitated scientific methods, cannot achieve. A start has been made here for a real recovery of social life that emerges from the spiritual and soul. And what is the ultimate reason for this?

Through anthroposophy, we can see how thought has a formative effect. Now, thought not only has a formative effect in the human body as the soul-spiritual element, it also has a formative effect if we can introduce it into human social life in the right way as social ideals, and the will that has been understood in the right way also works in a social relationship. For just as we know that the human body is dissolved through it, so too that which, as a comprehended element of will, is properly introduced into social life, will recognize at the right moment when any institution has outlived itself and must disappear, so that its fruits can be reborn in a new form. Just as the soul and spirit rise up out of the physical in the way described, so the higher structures of social life rise up through the disappearance of certain external institutions that have outlived their purpose, through this disappearance working together with the plastic-constructive. I would say that the question of social riddles can also flow out into social life, solving that which is seen through in the right anthroposophical grasp of the riddles of the human soul.

But through this, the human being comes to understand himself in the right way, to be imbued with the right inner strength, with the true strength of his real self, which lives in human feeling, in human soul. Between the life of ideas and the life of will, there lives the always incomprehensible, always intangible, but no less tangible emotional life of the human being. And in this emotional being, for those who are able to look at life in this way, as I have characterized it today in relation to the riddles of the soul, they experience the eternal I, which goes through repeated earthly lives. Then one knows how to look at the plastic-creative, developed life of the imagination and the spiritualized life of the will, which breaks down.

In this way, one learns to grasp that in man which has entered him through birth or conception in such a way that it initially points back to earlier earth lives, to the state in primeval times when the outer cosmic was so little separated from the inner life of man that he needed not repeated earth-lives, but one of continuous spiritual, soul and natural progress in order to achieve this progress. One learns to look at repeated earth lives, at spiritual-soul lives lying between them; one learns to look into the future until a state where man will again have connected himself with the spiritual so that the repeated earth-lives lose their meaning, in that man elevates himself to the spiritualization of his existence — I would say — with an experience that strives from the mere inanimate into spirituality.

One is led through the solution of the soul riddle to the true solution of the riddle of the world; one ascends to the human soul, to the cosmos. But through this one attains living knowledge, living insight, which, as I have already indicated, is spiritual nourishment. Thus knowledge, as it is presented by anthroposophy, becomes a real inner support for the soul in the element where life is faltering. Security, sustenance and orientation in life can be found by seeking the spiritual nourishment that comes from anthroposophy. It is something that secretly makes us rejoice, that we could lose ourselves in, and it brings us back to ourselves, transforming it into inner support, giving our inner balance an inner center of gravity. And in the difficult moments of life, too, when we are often in danger of sinking in misfortune; we can find support in a mood of the soul that is inwardly sustained by the full awareness of the spirituality that fills the human being, where we become fully aware of that the life of thought is not in vain, that it can find reality in the power of the soul and the world, which gives plastic form. This gives support in the difficult moments of life, it places life on a firm foundation and leads in the right way to the end of life.

Sometimes words spoken before the turn of the millennium linger on. So we could be reminded here, in reference to what has been said today, of the saying of an old Greek pre-Socratic sage, who, out of an initially intuitive realization, speaks the weighty word: “When the human soul, freed from the body, soars into the free ether, it is an immortal spirit, freed from death.”

Yes, the riddles of the soul can be solved by real science. One can come to this conviction by trying to solve the riddles of everyday life of the soul through real spiritual insight. One can see a glimpse of the knowledge of immortality in the ordinary events of life. And he who can judge the individual unfoldings of thought, feeling and will aright, already sees the immortal in them. And he then looks up to the immortality in the all-embracing sense and thus comes to a real grasp of the eternal in human nature, which is rooted in the eternal ground of existence in the Cosmos, in the evolution of the world.