# The Essence of Anthroposophy

## GA 80a — 18 January 1922, Frankfurt

### The Essence of Anthroposophy

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is regarded by many people who have only been superficially introduced to it as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm of the world by way of knowledge, a realm that a serious scientist should not concern with. For in fact, anthroposophy seeks to find the means to penetrate through real knowledge into those supersensible worlds in which the immortal germ of the human soul is rooted, and from which the human soul can learn its true nature. Now it is well known that even today quite serious scientists are already dealing with all kinds of abnormal soul abilities that occur in many personalities, which indicate that in the human being, indeed, quite different world connections are revealed than those that can be mastered with the recognized scientific methods.

But these personalities, who preferably turn to the abnormal human soul and bodily abilities, which then register what comes to light through observation in a completely scientific way, seek laws for this, which alone only truly give the anthroposophical spiritual paths. Since it seeks to lead the ordinary, normal human cognitive faculties beyond their ordinary measure, the anthroposophical path of the spirit often appears to them as something fanciful, as something fantastic, and sometimes they even categorize it as superstition. But it cannot be said that those of a visionary, nebulous and mystical nature could find particular satisfaction in what is considered anthroposophy today.

This anthroposophy certainly does not want to take its scientific attitude and conscientiousness any less seriously and methodically than the recognized sciences themselves. And even if it is true that there are a great many people today who, simply because of a certain dissatisfaction with life, run to everything that is somehow called occult, it must be said that very soon such natures in particular will not be able to find satisfaction in the strict, methodical thinking that is sought in anthroposophy as well as in other fields of science. This does not, of course, prevent some people from simply dismissing it with a slight wave of the hand because of something unusual in anthroposophy, since those who are interested in anthroposophy belonged to the neurasthenic or hysterical types! And so it is somewhat difficult to speak briefly about the actual essence of anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. I would like to do it by attempting to subject the research paths of anthroposophy to a consideration before you today and then hint at some of the essential results.

From these words alone, you will have gathered that, at least in spirit, anthroposophy seeks to emulate and live up to the ideal of the strict scientific method that has emerged in the last three to four centuries of scientific research. Anthroposophy does not want to be in opposition to the legitimate paths of scientific knowledge. It only wants to extend what science gives for the sense realm into those realms that can be described as the supersensible world, but in doing so, if it does not want to proceed in a dilettantish manner, it faces two very formidable obstacles that hinder human knowledge.

The first shows how strict scientific knowledge comes up against certain limits, how it can indeed lead to satisfactory results when it deals with facts, but how it immediately encounters unsatisfactory ones when it wants to go beyond the realm of facts that can be perceived or combined by the human mind. We know that the most serious natural scientists are very particular that these boundaries should not be crossed by all kinds of fantasies. It is precisely in this respect that Anthroposophy initially places itself squarely on the ground of scientific thinking. It is clear, however, that the thinking that humans apply in ordinary life and in science is by no means only suitable for the realm of external facts. Now, some try to move on to pure thinking in order to fathom what lies behind the world of sense perceptions. But human thinking does not dwell only on facts. Rather, having been educated through the social culture of the last few centuries, it has gained its own character from these facts, and by leaving philosophical speculation, it enters into unsatisfied areas, into a kind of emptiness. This is the source of the many disputes among the philosophical systems of worldview. And it is the source of the feeling that if one philosophizes into the world with thinking that has escaped from facts, one can subjectively guide the direction and current of thinking, and therefore what can be achieved must remain unsatisfied because it must carry an element of subjective arbitrariness of the human being. That is the one pitfall of philosophical world view speculation.

But there are people who, out of the deepest longings of the human soul, who strive for the knowledge of the eternal, feel unsatisfied with mere knowledge of nature, who understand the unsatisfactory nature of philosophical speculation left to its own devices, and therefore turn to a more or less unclear mysticism, in the belief that they can penetrate into the depths of the human soul through inner contemplation and, through this inner contemplation within human nature, recognize the eternal of the human soul beyond death and birth.

Those who look at these often sincerely meant mystical aspirations with an open mind will also be able to see through the deceptions into which man falls precisely through these mystical contemplations. After all, what man takes in for his ordinary consciousness are only external impressions and perceptions. These communicate with the soul, they are presented. They are felt and sensed, and the results of them ignite the impulses of the will. But after all, everything that is in the soul through ordinary consciousness is a result of external perceptions. And those who believe that they can already bring something eternal out of the depths of the soul with this ordinary consciousness cannot examine the inner life of a person in an unbiased way. Those who know how impressions that the human soul felt decades ago, impressions that it was not fully aware of, are processed internally, transformed in the realm of ideas and imbued with emotional content, how then these ideas can be brought out of the soul after many years, having undergone a complete transformation. If one is not conscientious, one might succumb to the illusion that one has brought something divine out of the depths of the soul, when in fact one has only drawn up something transformed that had been slumbering there for a long time.

I had to mention these two pitfalls at the outset because, in an introductory lecture, I can only create a sense of the strictness with which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible world and how it seeks to avoid illusory paths in both directions. Thus, Anthroposophy recognizes that one can penetrate into supersensible worlds in a satisfactory way neither by the path of left-to-itself philosophical speculation nor by mysticism. By clearly recognizing this precondition for its own task, anthroposophy comes to say: Man, who is sometimes guided so surely by the practical tasks of life from birth to death and who is led by them into the triumphs of science, cannot, if he understands himself correctly, believe that he can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through all of this. Therefore, Anthroposophy does not appeal to these ordinary powers of knowledge, nor to abnormal ones either, but says to itself, there are dormant cognitive abilities in every human soul that can be brought up through conscientious, strictly regulated, methodical inner soul exercises. You have to have intellectual humility. You have to be able to say: I look back: what was I like when I was a very young child, when the world passed before my soul like a dream, how did I have to develop my abilities from week to week, from year to year, how did I have to bring them out of the depths of my human nature.

Now anthroposophy shows that it is possible to take all the soul abilities that have developed since childhood and, as a mature human being, to take their development into one's own hands and lead them to higher abilities. This is what distinguishes anthroposophy from the other fields of knowledge: the latter take the ordinary cognitive abilities into account, but anthroposophy begins where these sciences end, by developing these abilities into supersensible cognitive abilities.

This does not happen through some fantastic method, nor through external action, but rather in such a way that the same strict method prevails in its training, which is otherwise only known when one truly understands the essence of science. Developing anthroposophy is no easier than conducting research in an observatory or medical clinic. The exercises take years of soul-searching for the individual. I have described these in more detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”. The main thing is to develop the human thought life of ordinary life, to strengthen it inwardly. Just as one can strengthen a muscle when it is used for work, so one can strengthen the imaginative life of the soul when it is directed in a certain direction. The strengthening of the human imaginative life should be brought to the center of your consciousness so that it occupies a manageable complex. It is necessary that the human being experiences this imagination as he otherwise only regards an external sensory perception. We must look at this external perception impartially, objectively, we must take it as it is. Exactly the same relationship must exist in the soul towards that which is practiced as meditative, concentrating thinking.

For this reason, it is good if the person does not bring any ideas from memory to these soul exercises, because these have become intertwined and transformed, but takes a completely new sentence or saying from some source. Then the content of the image is incorporated into the soul life, and all the soul activity seeks to concentrate on this single content. All the powers at work in the soul are directed towards this content, and this applies to all exercises. They must be subordinated to the human will; there must be nothing of suggestion or dream-like in the activity. As strictly as one is consciously devoted to a mathematical operation, so must one concentrate on a particular thought. This enables us to concentrate on a particular thought in a way that is otherwise only possible with external sensory impressions, so that the inner idea acquires exactly the same vividness and vividness as an external experience. Through these deliberate efforts of thought, one comes to face thought itself quite differently. Only now do we learn to recognize that our ordinary thought life, devoted to external facts or memories, is bound to the human organism. This new thinking is inwardly pictorial. One's soul life leads into a pictorial experience, into an experience that I have called imaginative, not because mere imaginings are to be achieved, but because the human soul can indeed enter into an inner plastic image life and because it feels in it how it becomes more and more free from the body and gains more and more disembodied soul life.

But one thing must be clear: at first everything that is attained is an inner subjective experience. Those who approach anthroposophy seriously will see the enormous difference between this new thinking and the morbid, hallucinatory. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophy point out, in a misleading way, that the higher soul abilities that are praised can be nothing other than what predominates as dream-like soul experiences in visions and so on. In truth, anthroposophy is directed towards the opposite pole of what is pathological. There, the person loses their ordinary consciousness; the hallucinator lives in their hallucinations; the suggestible person lives solely in the experience of this dream-like, illusory state. Those who direct their soul life towards real imagination know that at first they only experience images, but they always have a second personality, a consciousness, alongside them, just as they do in ordinary life and in science. They have their human personality with everyday, healthy common sense, which can constantly control and subject to criticism what arises as a second, imaginative consciousness.

But what must go hand in hand with such exercises, so that not only the concentration of thoughts is practiced, the directing of the soul's abilities to some complex of ideas, so that one may gain an inner strength, is the same arbitrariness in the opposite activity. One will soon notice when concentrating in this way that these thoughts take up one's attention, that one can become absorbed in them. Now one must learn to use one's free will in such a way that one can bring such ideas out of one's consciousness again and suppress them just as arbitrarily as one has taken them in. On the one hand, we see the invigoration of the soul life in the absorbed complex of ideas, and on the other hand, the redirection of the same. This empty consciousness is not a state of sleep, but a full consciousness that has consciously eliminated a mental image.

Once you have done these exercises, you will be able to survey your life from birth onwards, but inwardly. We have a current flowing in the depths of our soul from which we can bring up one or the other memory, but usually only in fragments and temporal fragments. But by reaching into the imaginative life of the soul, we grasp the individual elements of it all at once in a tableau, we have before us the basic forces that form it and how they have been working in man since birth. It is as if the time during which we usually review our memories had become a single moment. This is the first supersensible experience we have. We see through the entire stream of our life on earth. Man feels within himself a second supersensible body that cannot be developed with the physical one, it can only be recognized through imagination. Furthermore, it is something that is not limited as a single form in space, but something that runs in time, although it can be seen in a single tableau. I would like to call this second supersensible corporeality of the human being the formative forces body, the etheric body. One comes to see oneself inwardly, how one inwardly guides one's abilities, how one comes to one's moral forces, and so on. One learns to recognize oneself as a whole human being in the course of time. One cannot paint this formative body other than as a flash of lightning that can only be captured in a moment, as everything in constant motion allows only a momentary reproduction, as one cannot philosophically speculate on what one directly perceives if one continues in the described manner.

Once the soul faculties have been strengthened, it becomes possible to suppress everything comprehended in its totality, as previously the individual pictorial components, so that one now produces an empty consciousness and becomes capable of exposing oneself to a world and waiting to see what now enters into this world. What enters the human soul is quite different from what is present in the world we are accustomed to in the senses. For what now enters the empty consciousness is the supersensible, the eternal spiritual of the human soul. One has received the power to survey the spiritual-soul realm! One experiences the moment of each individual memory, as it was before the soul had connected with a body through conception or birth. One experiences the spiritual-soul as it was when the human being was still rooted in the spiritual-soul. In this way, one gains an insight into what is given to the human being not only as a result of his physical body, but also in terms of the forces of heredity. One sees how these forces work their way into the physical body, but what was already there before it took possession of the body, before the first appearance of the body in a spiritual-soul world. We arrive at the creative aspect of the soul-spiritual by juxtaposing the mortal human body and that which works into the forces of inheritance. Then we will come ever closer to an understanding of the immortal part of the human being. This level of knowledge is the inspired one. Just as the breath is first in space and then processed in the body, so the spiritual-soul enters into the human mortal body, and by recognizing it, we speak of inspired knowledge.

In this way, the human being has gained the preparation not only to strengthen his world of thoughts, but also to advance his world of will through a spiritual training that goes beyond what is possible in ordinary life. On the one hand, it must be pointed out that one can only penetrate into the supersensible worlds by transforming the thinking of ordinary life, and so one recognizes that anthroposophy begins where ordinary science must end.

However, one only reaches one side of the supersensible existence. Just as the life of feeling is found between will and thinking in the complete human soul, so too must this life of feeling and will be further developed in a similar way. Again, it must be practiced with strict conscientiousness, just as one can also tear the will away from the human body. This then takes us to the other side, to the side of death, which leads beyond death to the human soul. The exercises of the will strive into the supersensible realm, and must therefore be linked to those parts that already fall from the supersensible into ordinary life. This, in turn, can be achieved in a wide variety of ways; I refer the reader to the books already mentioned. I would like to give only a few examples here, by means of which the liberation of the human will from its bondage to the body can be achieved.

In human life, the impulse of the will is permeated by our instinctual life. But we can arrive at exercises of the will precisely by considering how everything that is isolated in the intellect becomes a unified whole in the soul. When we think, the element of the will lives in our thinking. If we consider how our inherited thinking unfolds in ordinary life, we find that It adheres to the sequence, the course of events. We abandon ourselves to our thinking, more or less passively, to the course of events. Even if we free this thinking logically, it happens in such a way that we want to understand the course of events logically with our logic, but we do not move away from it! Only when we tear thought away from its usual mode of activity, when, for example, we imagine a drama piece by piece from the last scene to the first, or when we review the day in the evening backwards to the morning, going into as much detail as possible, so that we fully engage our soul life, or when, for example, when climbing several floors, we follow the staircase backwards to the first one, and thus gradually make a strong willpower a habit, you also tear the will away from ordinary life and achieve a transformation of the soul's will, until you learn to watch your own actions as you can watch a foreign personality. One must acquire a certain skill in walking alongside oneself and controlling oneself like a stranger, in exercising the will to undertake things that one then conscientiously carries out. In this way one comes to detach this will so completely from the physical that one knows: You now want outside of your body! The life of feeling then connects on both sides, it transforms like the life of thought and will.

But since it is the most intimate part of the human soul, it should not be artificially developed, but this life of feeling follows human development into the supersensible world.

We learn to develop the necessary enthusiasm for what we encounter in the spiritual worlds, seemingly for objective reasons. When the will is freed in the above way, one reaches the third stage of supersensible knowledge, which is called intuitive. There the word is applied when the soul is truly able to place itself in the spiritual world, free of the body. By ascending to this intuition, man becomes acquainted with that which continues to have an effect in him after it has come into the human body as his soul and spirit through conception and birth. He learns how the soul detaches itself from the human being, what is spiritual and soul-like, what is independent and immortal, what enters the gate of death when the body is left to decay – then what is intuitively seen enters the spiritual and soul world.

In the nineties, I tried to address the problem of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom” and to show that the question is not posed correctly. The truth is that man is dependent for a large number of actions, but that he stands out, develops into a free personality by learning to shape his will impulses, grasped in pure thinking. Only in these areas, in the impulses that underlie our truly free actions, do we have a presentiment of what also lives objectively in the human being and what enters the spiritual-soul world after death. In “Philosophy of Freedom” I called this the moral intuition. A higher stage of development is formed by cognitive intuition, in which we gain a complete overview of immortality, that the spiritual soul enters through the gate of death to further paths in the spiritual-soul world. After recognizing the eternal nature of the human soul in this way, one also gets to know the soul's environment before it enters the body and after it has left it. Not only does the outer world of the senses open up, but the developed powers of the senses can penetrate into the human soul. They are able not only to bring up what is nebulous and mystical, but also to see the truly eternal in the human soul. By having the spiritual and soul life of the human being concretely before us, we can distinguish the two worlds from each other, what belongs to the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. By getting to know these two worlds, one learns, precisely through the characterized intuition, to know something else in the human being, which connects with human feeling and is recognized as the essence of human feeling. Then the observation extends to the past, in that one not only beholds the soul before birth. Rather, one looks at the repeated earth lives, at what the spiritual world has gone through. One gains the confidence that worlds will continue to be experienced in the future, in repeated earth lives of progressive development. This becomes clear to him who beholds the affiliation of the human soul to the supersensible world.

And he recognizes that which rises to a higher existence of forces, which carries the acquisitions of both worlds from life to life. But he recognizes not only the human entity, but also the spiritual-soul entity, free of illusion, which lies within the sense world, but which is not recognizable to the ordinary faculty of perception.

By developing these abilities over time, one learns to look at this physical-sensory world, not as if one could no longer fully trust common sense, but by developing the second personality alongside it, which has spiritual-soul senses that can see what it sees physically-sensually, also in a soulful way. One also learns to look at the cosmos differently. However, I am coming to something here where anthroposophy is even more antipathetic!

For example, in our ordinary lives we face the sun as a limited spatial being, we describe it in science in the familiar way. If we now acquire the higher cognitive abilities, then the sun presents itself to us in a different way. We learn to speak of something that is not limited within its contours. We get to know the sun-like, which permeates everything, which belongs to the human environment, which fills and permeates the world, which penetrates into human life. We can also clearly recognize this transformed sun-like quality in ourselves. It proves to be as related to us as any external object of perception. We come to understand how much that is sunny enters into the human being, how it strengthens all growth forces, how it makes us young, keeps us young, accompanies us through life, makes our nourishment a process, permeates us in ascending development — that is the result of the spiritual-sunny.

In contrast to this, we recognize the lunar. It permeates everything that is already stored in us from birth as the forces of aging, withering, dying, as descending life. From the mid-thirties onwards, the disintegrating forces in the human being gain the upper hand, the degenerative, retrogressive, morbid — all this lies in the lunar. We learn to recognize how everything in the cosmos affects the human being. In this way, we can see what we recognize from the relationship between man and the cosmos, beyond the stars. We arrive at a spiritual-soul cosmos through direct observation, not through analogical conclusions! There are no illusions here. Life immediately distinguishes reality from fantasies. Just as one can philosophically distinguish the mere idea of the heat of steel from the concrete touch of the hot iron rod, so does experience in the spiritual realm distinguish the merely conceivable from that which really is. And just as one progresses from imagination to inspiration, so one knows that one is progressing to a real world.

Thus, in a systematic development of the human powers of knowledge, the spiritual-soul cosmos with its immortal beings enters the ordinary world of the cosmos of the senses. In this way, by beholding the deeper-lying forces of the world and of human nature, one also comes to recognize how that which is in human nature transforms. As supersensible knowledge is attained, what otherwise appears in sharp contours dissolves. The human heart, lungs and so on dissolve into processes. One can only speak of the brain-lung-heart process. What is otherwise sharply defined in space becomes mobile. In this we see the sun-like and moon-like forces at work, and here the potential of anthroposophy is extended to include the fertilization of the individual sciences.

By looking into the process of becoming and building up in the human organism, into the becoming and degenerating plant and animal beings, by discovering the forces of the supersensible in the realm of dead stone, we find the relationships of the inner human being to the inner forces of the cosmos. There is a way in which anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the medical element. This is why we were able to start therapy with pathology. In Stuttgart and Dornach, we have a therapeutic institute based on anthroposophical principles. And it is possible to gain insights into irregular degradation processes and to recognize how this disease can be healed by building up forces. Instead of a medicine that only tries things out, we have a healing art that, on the one hand, takes in both the healthy and the diseased and, on the other, the healing. Here we have an example of how anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences. [There is also a physical and biological institute in Stuttgart.] On the basis of scientific research, the supernatural is incorporated into the results. These forces also have a significance for technology and for practical life in a new form.

Anthroposophy also has a fruitful effect on the artistic side. This is manifested at the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science near Basel. When Anthroposophy draws on the deeper human soul forces, it has an effect on and from the whole person. Just as the nut is governed by the same forces within as it is in the shell, so the artistic framework that Anthroposophy needs must be like the shell around the kernel, arising out of the same impulses from which ideas flow when they are born of spiritual insight. This is how the new architectural style in architecture, sculpture and painting came about. In a further progression, it realizes what Goethe felt in his soul when he said: When nature begins to reveal its true secrets to us, we feel the deepest longing for its deepest interpreter, art. — Art is a secret manifestation of the deepest laws of nature. Not through allegories or abstract symbols, but through the creation of real art forms, it shows that anthroposophy is not a theory, but direct life that can have a fertilizing effect in all areas.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart shows what can be achieved in the knowledge of the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. The great educators do not stand in opposition, but by grasping the full human being in the child, the highest pedagogical achievement in education is already achieved. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view, and religious education is also given in the various denominations. The Waldorf school is an institution in which the practical implementation of teaching from morning to evening is realized with pedagogical and didactic skill based on anthroposophical knowledge. Teachers know what is developing in each human being at each age, they can read the curriculum and teaching objectives from the human being, they do not graft anything into him, but they develop in the child what already resides in the human being.

Finally, I would like to point out how the scientific world view, due to its one-sidedness in social terms, has reached a kind of dead end. What is to take effect in social life cannot, as Marx says, work according to abstract laws; one must look at the whole human being, the fully developed human being. Today, the one-sidedness that comes from the man of sense and intellect has already become a fact, as we see in Eastern Europe. It is this that makes us long for an understanding of the whole human being, of body, soul and spirit. Only that which has a real effect on life in the social sphere can have a healing and salutary effect.

Anthroposophy will continue to develop in this direction. During the various presentations at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart in the summer of 1921, it was shown how experimental education must be supplemented by the results of spiritual anthroposophical research, and how a complete education can only be formed from this. The bankruptcy of national economics was demonstrated by Director Leinhas. He showed where the real life-giving forces for a healthy social organization must flow from. Anthroposophy does not want to lead to a mystical, nebulous cloud-cuckoo-land, to those who despise ordinary everyday life, but the spirit is so powerfully grasped that we can also work creatively in the physical-practical , because the spirit that created matter should not flee from it, it, which is life practice, can submerge everything in the physical-material existence, so that it becomes more and more perfect in its further development.

And so anthroposophy wants to offer the knowledge that a large part of our contemporaries yearns for, even if unconsciously. I would like to summarize everything that has been said so that I can characterize the essence of anthroposophy.

When we have the whole human being before us, we look at him through our senses themselves as a sensual being according to his outer form. But he does not stand before us in the one-sided revelation of a new being. In him lives a soul permeated by spirit. The human being needs a conception of life that permeates him from the spirit. In the last few centuries, we have achieved great things in the field of natural science. However, we are still far from realizing its ideals. While we fully recognize the achievements of science, anthroposophy recognizes that this science is concerned with the outer formations of the world. Just as the soul permeates and spiritualizes the human being, science also needs something that is inspired by the spirit. Anthroposophy further develops science. For it wants to be nothing other than the spiritual, blissful element for the body of natural science. And just as we encounter people in life with souls permeated by life and spirit, so anthroposophy strives for natural science to achieve knowledge that can gradually become a soul permeated by spirit.