The Essence of Anthroposophy

GA 80a — 12 May 1922, Berlin

Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

My venerated attendees!

In a sense, my lecture today will make a prerequisite, since I gave the scientific basis for the examination of anthroposophy with the science of the present in the last lectures that I gave here in Berlin, and it would only be a repetition for those of the honored audience who were present at the time if I were to repeat these foundations today. So today I will have a few things to say that can be understood quite independently, but which require those lectures for their scientific justification.

When man speaks of spirit and spiritual knowledge, it must be said that he is actually pointing to something that is constantly present to him, at least insofar as he is awake. Man cannot doubt that both his cognitive and volitional activity with the external world is carried out by him in such a way that he is spiritually active with his whole being. And so man actually speaks of spiritual activity as if it were something independent. The difficulties actually only begin where it is a matter of penetrating deeper into the nature of the human spirit and the spiritual foundations of the world. When this is said, the most diverse things can be pointed out. For from many sides these inner soul difficulties arise in relation to the spiritual life in man. And I will, so to speak, pick out just one example that illustrates how these difficulties arise and ultimately take hold of the whole human soul. I will give an example that is perhaps not always felt as strongly as others. But much of what the human being has to deal with because of the inner destiny he has to live through lies in semi- or wholly subconscious mental processes. People do not always realize the origins of their inner suffering and their inner mood. But with unbiased self-observation, which is based on a certain, also scientific self-education, one can discover the origins of these moods, these feelings of happiness and suffering in the soul life, which mean a great deal, very much, for the way in which a person can engage with life, the way in which he can be active in life, and the way in which he can work for the good or ill of his fellow human beings in the world. And so I would like to point out how, when he summarizes what he calls his spiritual life, man can, as it were, feel the powerlessness of this spiritual life anew every day; as I said, even if he does not feel it, the result of these unconscious emotional connections in his soul life points to it. Man feels the powerlessness of spiritual life every time he sees this spiritual life paralyzing, when he sees it sinking into a state of sleep, and between falling asleep and waking up, this spiritual life completely sinks into a kind of unknown world for him. Then he feels, as it were, the powerlessness of that spiritual life, which he is able to hold within his earthly existence through his own soul power. The course of the world takes away this soul life from him, takes away this inner spiritual activity from him every day.

But then, when a person observes with a certain impartiality how he awakens from sleep again, how he perhaps, with the transition through the dream life, which he can only see as unreal compared to the external physical reality of the world, re-enters his physical earthly existence in such a way that he, as it were, strengthens his soul nature with all that permeates his bodily organization, with all that is active in his will, then the human being feels, or can at least feel, a difference. He feels how spiritual life becomes dependent on physical corporeality. But at the same time he feels that he cannot look down into this physical corporeality. He feels that, in a sense, this spiritual life sinks into his own being, so to speak, sinks into a kind of darkness into which he cannot look. He feels how that which he calls his spiritual life is seized by the processes of bodily life, by nervous processes or by others. He cannot see through it, it eludes him as if in a kind of inner darkness.

What one can feel when one is able to go so deeply into one's powerlessness in the face of the spiritual being of the human being, one might compare it to a kind of emotional breathlessness. And this emotional breathlessness, with all the uncertainties of life that it contains, can spread over the entire state of mind like an inner, spiritual cloud and give rise to the great question of life: What am I? What am I here for in this world?

And again, when a person sees how their spiritual life is submerged in the physical, as it were in darkness, they feel just as if, if I am to compare it with something physical, the air they breathe were being spoiled by the metabolism. He feels as if he is in some kind of mental suffocation, or at least he can feel it. But it is precisely these two poles of insecurity and uncertainty that lie at the heart of the human being. And that is what has led to humanity always searching for the essence of what the spiritual actually is.

Anthroposophy, in the sense in which it is meant here in my lectures, seeks to approach this spiritual world from the point of view of modern human consciousness. However, it must be well aware of what is easily placed before the door of the spiritual world, so that man is either unable to pass through it in the right way or is unable to pass through it at all. For two powerful enemies of the inner human life lie in wait at the gates of the spiritual world: superstition on the one hand, with all its delusions, and doubt on the other. Those who suffer from superstition, despite feeling so happy in it, are those who do not want to come to terms with what modern science has to offer. They then conjure up all kinds of images from the arbitrariness of their inner soul life, through which they try to understand what the spiritual world is for them. Yes, one can, in a certain respect, I would say, with a certain superficiality of mind, be satisfied with the delusions of superstition. But if you want to be or have to be an active person, if you want to intervene in life, when you encounter phenomena in nature or in human life, then you feel how everywhere that what the human soul produces in terms of superstitious delusions is shattered, and you end up with a certain lack of orientation in life. You can't find your way in life because you bump into everything, life becomes full of corners and edges, because what is revealed in things is something different from what superstition conjures up from the soul.

Those, on the other hand, who have become more immersed in modern science educate their thinking by the phenomena of the external world, by what observation and experiment can yield to modern man. But they often find that this thinking sticks to what the external basis of knowledge is, what the senses alone provide. This leads them to say to themselves: I can only apply this thinking to what the senses tell me. And they find this thinking, so to speak, too thin to somehow penetrate from the world of the senses into a world of the supersensible, into a world of the spiritual. Then doubt creeps in. This doubt can be thought up, can perhaps even be logically justified. But doubt cannot be lived in the long run if one does not want to help oneself over it through all kinds of superficiality and illusion. And if you do the latter, then doubt settles deep down in the mind and takes hold of the physical shell through the pathways that lead from the mind to the body. Gradually, through the influence of doubt, a person feels like a weakling, and it may then be that the more he entangles himself in doubt with his logic and science, the more the effects of doubt take hold of him in life and he comes, so to speak, if the expression seems exaggerated, it still has a certain justification, into a kind of mental “consumption” that makes him unsuitable to fully engage in the tasks of life. And if he does not notice how doubt consumes him, then others notice it, and what doubt has made of him comes back to him in the way he is valued in life.

In this way, one can look more deeply into the way in which man places and must place himself in relation to what he calls the spiritual world. In our time, people who have just come to doubt an immediate insight, an immediate realization of the healthy judgment of man into the spiritual world, either find a certain reassurance by turning back or not stepping out at all from what has become of them, to and into all kinds of old traditional worldviews and creeds. Many have a certain fear, a certain shyness, to step out of what they were born or raised into as old creeds, because they fear losing that foothold in life by losing a view into the spiritual world as a result.

Others, who cannot hold on to what has been passed down to us through the immeasurable forces of human civilization and the various revelations of the spiritual world, are going through strange developments today. They despair of the possibility that a healthy person can see into the spiritual world, and so they turn to what anthroposophy, in harmony with true natural science, must also understand, but in a certain respect to the sick person. They turn to what can be delivered to them through all kinds of mediumistic arts. They cling to what certain natures can see in visions and the like. What is the basis for this? In every case, if one really approaches the subject impartially, one can say that a medium can only arise from the fact that the physical organization is such that certain external impressions can be penetrated and suppressed, that the deeper physical nature can stir more than it can when a person is devoted to his healthy sensory impressions. From what can reveal itself in a certain way, it is believed that one can learn a great deal about what does not reveal itself in the normal state of life, and this is then seen as the intervention of another world in this, our world. It is easy to prove that in all cases where something visionary becomes present in the human soul, it is based on some kind of detuning of the human organization. Without delving into the pathological, it is impossible to explain what arises in a visionary way in the human soul as spiritual content. And so we see how those today who despair of the normal, active human being being able to penetrate into the spiritual world turn to the abnormally active person.

In the face of these things, anthroposophy behaves in such a way that it starts from the healthy person, both in soul and body. And when I had to deal here with how man can awaken slumbering powers of knowledge through certain soul exercises in life and in science in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, the prerequisite was made that such exercises are only undertaken when there is absolute mental and physical health. Anthroposophy must, to a certain extent, deal with the directions just characterized, which are taken to enter the spiritual world, if it wants to discuss its relationship to the spiritual world. In this respect, it can be seen that certain spiritual contents, which people today more or less accept as contents of revelation, are effective above all through their venerable age. Today, we also see what impression this venerable age of such revelation makes on people seeking the spiritual. We see people doubting the paths that the human spirit of science can take into the spiritual world.

And so they turn back to the ancient times of human development or turn to what still extends from such ancient times into our time, in order to see, as it were, how people once came to what is available in traditional religious beliefs as a world view through their own powers of knowledge. With supersensible vision, as I have developed it in my last lectures, one comes to an extraordinarily significant spiritual discovery about the development of human spiritual striving. If we look impartially at what is actually present in the traditional beliefs that exist today, to which thousands and thousands of people turn with the deepest needs of their souls, we find that, ultimately, they are based on paths of knowledge that people once walked, perhaps by very different means than we consider right today. It may be said that everything we take in as a worldview from historical development or tradition, or that we take in through faith, has once been regarded as knowledge. All the supersensible assertions and dogmas that can be found in our creeds, in our world views, in our philosophies are based on what people once sought out of themselves, on paths that are similar in some respects to the paths that I will speak of again today as the anthroposophical ones, but which were fundamentally different in earlier times. But even today we can gain some understanding of the path to the spiritual world by turning our gaze back to the paths that were once taken into these spiritual worlds.

Now I would like to pick out two paths that people have taken, both of which are completely impassable for us Westerners today. But if we look at them with an open mind, we will see that ultimately these paths also arose from the same attitude that we act on today when we seek the spiritual world through anthroposophy. These two examples are the ancient Indian yoga practice, through which serious seekers of the spirit once sought to enter the supersensible world, and, further, that which can be called asceticism in the times when it was not in a state of decadence, both paths which, as I said, are not suitable for our Western humanity, but by which one can ascend to an understanding of the path that is necessary today.

What did the ancient practice of yoga consist of? Among other things, it included a kind of regulation of the human being's breathing, such that the person, for the purpose of knowledge, did not give himself over to the natural breathing that is his in ordinary life, but rather breathed differently according to certain laws. What is the actual goal of such yogic breathing? What is the significance of the fact that one imposes on oneself the inner obligation to breathe differently, to draw in the breath differently, to hold it differently than one does in ordinary life, and also to shape the exhalation in a peculiar way, for a while and again and again, and again? The purpose of this is to direct one's consciousness to an inner human process, namely breathing, which otherwise takes place unconsciously, either entirely or at least for the most part. I would like to say that we take breathing for granted in our ordinary lives. We do not pay attention to breathing. But the moment the Indian yoga student begins to breathe differently from the way he takes breathing for granted, the whole attention of his soul life is directed to this breathing process. The breathing process becomes something he can experience strongly within. And what does he experience in the end? He experiences the connection between the breathing process and human thinking. What is presented here can be characterized in the following way in abstract logical terms. As we draw in the breath, we simultaneously push it rhythmically up into the organ of our thinking, the brain and nervous system. The breath interweaves and undulates through what takes place in the brain. As modern people, when we breathe, we do not pay attention to how the breath flows through the thinking process. But it is precisely this flowing that the Indian yogi wants to make clear. He permeates what is abstract thinking for us with the denser current of the breath, which he becomes aware of. In this way, he strengthens his thinking in ways that take place entirely internally in the human organism. He invigorates his thinking, but he also enlivens it. What now comes inwardly to his consciousness is a different thinking from what goes on in everyday life.

To one who has practiced yoga, this thinking of everyday life appears as a corpse appears to a living person. Ordinary abstract thinking, or thinking connected with sense perceptions, appears dead in comparison to the inwardly living thinking that is gained through such strengthening for the consciousness. But then, through his strengthened thinking, he who has done such exercises over and over again for a certain time looks deeper into the world. And because his thinking has now become so strong through this strengthening, as otherwise only our sensory perceptions are when, for example, we direct our eyes outwards, perceive the world of colors and it makes an intense impression on us, or when we perceive sounds through our ears, he sees because his thinking has now gained the same power as his perception. Although he does not see the external world with his thinking, he does experience the world. What has been seen in this way from the spiritual worlds by individuals who have undergone such a yoga practice has then been incorporated into the development of civilization of mankind. And some of those who today accept this or that, which has been handed down to them traditionally and historically as a world view, accept it without knowing that it is incorporated into human spiritual development from the results of this yoga practice. It can be said that in all worldviews, even in those that ascribe philosophical certainty to themselves – if one can only look at them correctly from an inner soul-historical perspective – much of what today's human being accepts comes precisely from that which once flowed into human consciousness in the way described.

By thinking in this way, which has been made alive, human beings explore something about the eternal nature of their being, explore something about the fact that they existed as spiritual-soul beings before they descended from spiritual-soul worlds into what was developed for them in their mother's womb from the physical world as their physical-bodily organism. With the thinking that is our own, without undergoing any training that strengthens and enlivens the thinking, we perceive only that part of the human being that exists between birth or conception and death. With invigorated and enlivened thinking, one perceives in human beings that which is their own eternal essence, that which can live even without being in a physical body, and that which immediately announces itself to enlivened thinking as that which lived as a spiritual being in a spiritual world before the beginning of our physical life. One gains vivid insight into the spiritual nature and spiritual past life of people.

This is the one path. Initially, it led its followers to look primarily at what is called the pre-existence of man in relation to his life on earth. And they devoted themselves to the practice of yoga with a certain one-sidedness. Through this, they gained an insight into the existence in which the human being was present in spirit and soul before birth or conception. They spoke of this part of human existence as if it were something self-evident. And in so doing, they overcame the powerlessness that humans feel in the face of the spiritual when they see it descend into a state of sleep every day. What becomes unconscious in sleep does not escape from animated thinking. For what becomes invisible to the sleeper is, so to speak, permeated with inner spiritual life, but in such a way that it extends beyond birth and death and announces itself as that which has a formative effect on the human organism – and it is already present from the moment of conception — so that it cannot be understood as a product of the human organism, but must be understood as that which submerges and immerses in this organism as its eternal, spiritual-soul nature.

Another direction is the one that has now led certain people of different cultural ages to see through the essence of a spiritual world, but which, on the other hand, spread light in life. As I said, the matter has often taken a harmful turn. But with anthroposophical science, one can look back to times when asceticism — I mean now — had not yet degenerated into its harmful currents, when it was not yet a certain spiritual coquetry, but when it was supposed to represent the most honest path of knowledge of certain soul seekers. Asceticism consists in the fact that man, in a sense, tunes down, paralyzes – one could even say – his ordinary life functions, that he suppresses what would otherwise well up and surge into his conscious life from his instincts, drives and passions in ordinary life, that he, out of full inner strength of soul, , to command certain inner stirrings, which are connected with the organism and the activity of the organs, to stand still for a while, that he even educates his body to keep a calmer pace for a while in relation to the bodily-physical functions and that which is connected with them: the urges, desires and passions. What was the reason for this? It was based on an insight gained through experience. For these ascetics came to certain insights, and in coming to them, they knew what asceticism is for them. They came to the realization that our physical body is indeed the rightful vehicle for everything we are meant to experience between birth and death, but that it is an obstacle to the perception of the spiritual world, and that everything that allows the essence of the spiritual world to arise in consciousness has the effect of descending in the manner indicated, on the expressions of this physicality. Those who in this way have, as it were, removed the physical obstacle to looking into the spiritual world, looked more to the other side of human eternity. They looked towards the gate of life that man has to pass through when he lays aside his physical body by dying, when he re-enters the spiritual world with his eternal being. They did not so much look at the pre-existence of human existence, but rather at the life that man enters when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have given you these two examples to show how, in other times, people have come to experiences and views about the spiritual world from certain backgrounds. But today we are faced with a world development, a cultural development, a life of civilization that must, above all, come into the right relationship with the outside world. Those who had acquired insights into the spiritual world either through the practice of Indian yoga or through asceticism had, in a sense, made themselves unsuitable for the outer life. By going through the yoga breathing practice described, the person tunes himself to become extraordinarily sensitive and to feel everything that is going on around him with extraordinary ease. He develops a tendency to withdraw from the outer life, just as when the horns of a snail are touched, it withdraws from the outer world into its shell. Thus we see that those who have come to real insights into the spiritual world have withdrawn and lived in hermitages, paying little attention to living with the outer world. We find the same with those who come into contact with the spiritual world through asceticism. They undergo exercises that aim to tune down the processes and powers of their physical bodies, thereby making them unsuitable for intervening in the more robust life of the outside world. Again, these people are also led to a certain inability to intervene in the external life. But again it was necessary for these people - for reasons that do not belong here - that they devoted themselves to a knowledge of the higher worlds, so that then the others, who more through authority accepted what such knowledgeable people could reveal to them, then accepted this in good faith and performed in the outer life what the reclusive hermits could not perform. But such behavior contradicts both our current knowledge and the demands of modern life.

We humans, who do not live like the original yogi scholars or like the former ascetics before the Copernican or Galilean era, but who live in the era in which a richly developed natural science has changed our entire external life and demands of us , if we want to be cognizant, we must also know how to intervene energetically in life. Today we must realize that it is no longer possible for us as people of the present to penetrate into the spiritual worlds in the ways described. But that does not prevent the modern man from finding his way into the supersensible world, if he undertakes certain things, as I have already indicated earlier, that have nothing to do with breathing practice, but that consist of meditation and concentration, through which the human being can enliven his thinking. In this way, it is similar to the inner experience of the yoga practitioner. Or when I describe the exercises of the will that a person can undergo, which aim to educate the self, to take one's own development into one's own hands, to discard certain habits with all one's strength, and to attain in terms of disposition or even attitude towards life, then what the human being experiences in this way through a strengthening of his will can bear a certain similarity to what the ancient ascetics experienced. But the aim is not to weaken the physical body, but rather to maintain it in its full efficiency and suitability for the outer life.

But what do we gain when we, on the one hand, invigorate our thinking through meditation and concentration in a way that is appropriate to the present time? We achieve something that, even in knowledge, does not need to withdraw from the outer world, but rather attains a very definite relationship to the outer world, a relationship that is entirely in harmony with what we are accustomed to applying as our methods of observation to the outer world at a lower scientific level. I will give an example in this direction, an example of what can become of our thinking through purely mental animation, through inner soul-strengthening of this thinking, precisely in relation to the outer world.

A large part of our present-day views about living beings, about the connection between animals and humans, for example, have been gained by comparing the individual organs, for example of higher animals or of animals in general, with the corresponding organs of humans. We also compare other things, for example blood composition and the like. From this we form an idea of how the human organization could be related to, how it could be related to what we encounter, for example, in the organization of higher animals. But there is a peculiarity. What I am going to say now is perhaps a little subtle, but the whole modern path of knowledge into the supersensible worlds is indeed a subtle one and must be considered in its details and peculiarities. Let us assume that an unprejudiced observer of the higher animal world forms a mental picture, not merely an external view through the senses, of a higher animal, and that he then also forms a mental picture of the structure and organization of the human being. He can visualize the relationship between the two. But if such an observer were now to be required to do the following, he would immediately notice how dead, how inanimate, how abstract his thought life actually is. It is just that man does not do this in ordinary life and in conventional science, and so he does not realize how inanimate his observation and his thinking are. Let us assume that he has formed an idea about their external organization and so on with regard to the higher animals. If he makes these thoughts alive, he cannot progress and draw the thought of the human organization from the living thought of the organization of the higher animals. He can only find a relationship between the two by first forming the thought of the higher animal, then that of the human being, and then bringing both into connection. But he cannot vividly bring forth the thought of the human being from that of the higher animal. His thinking does not have this inner vitality. We know this vitality from observing how we grow, carry out our daily metabolism and so on. But our thoughts stand side by side. We cannot let the thought of the human organization grow out of the thought of the animal organization, as the individual organs grow out of the more undifferentiated human organism in the human germ during the embryonic period. We have no living thinking in ordinary life, and all our thinking bears this imprint for common science as well as for ordinary life. But in the moment when one does soul-exercises that inwardly strengthen the thinking, the thinking comes to life, and one arrives at inwardly experiencing the form of a higher animal with these living thoughts, by going into how the higher animal bears the main direction of its organization horizontally, while man bears it vertically, how man frees his arms from the tasks they have in animals. To be able to do this, the human being must develop an inner relationship to that to which he has no relationship in ordinary thinking.

Because, dear honored attendees, in relation to external nature, we often think differently because we get by with dead thinking when we think about human nature, about living nature in general. For example, we look at a magnetized needle that can be rotated around its axis and find that it has a particularly distinct direction that points to the magnetic north pole on the one hand and to the magnetic south pole on the other. This leads us to the idea that the magnetic north-south direction in space has something distinctive about it compared to the other directions. We differentiate space, which would otherwise appear to us without distinction. When one has developed living thinking, the vertical direction can be similarly enlivened, which man acquires by bringing the animal organization, which is oriented in a completely different direction, into the vertical direction. One learns in this way to experience the world, and the whole space comes to life. But this enables one to move from the living thought of the animal organization to the living thought of the human organization. The thought of the human organization itself grows out of the living thought of the animal organization. One sees: by observing the phenomena of the outer world, thinking becomes alive. In the case of the Indian yogi, it only became alive through his coming into a relationship with the spiritual world; he did not enter into such a relationship with the outer world as we need in our process of knowledge.

Developing the ability to bring the world to consciousness as a living thing in this way still does not guarantee that we are dealing with reality. What we develop as living thinking could still be mere fantasy. One must have a criterion for knowing that one is not dealing with mere fantasy, but with something that, by living in our living thinking, also lives outside in the things themselves, so that the thought that I experience as living represents that which lives outside in the beings of nature itself. This characteristic arises for the one who, in the way I have presented it in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” or in other books, walks the path of knowledge to the living thought. The reality of the living thought presents itself to him simply by the fact that, when he has it, he experiences a mental pain, a suffering, in cherishing and experiencing this living thought with every step he takes inwardly in life. Yes, real higher knowledge cannot be attained without mental pain, without mental suffering. And what does this suffering, this pain, indicate?

Well, this pain and suffering is nothing other than what arises from the fact that our whole organism, our whole human being, becomes inwardly sensitive through and through, as otherwise only the senses are sensitive. We are accustomed to the sensitivity of the senses; they no longer cause us pain, even though processes also take place in the senses – for example in the eyes – which, if we had any sensation of pain at all for such processes, would appear to us as processes of pain. We do not have the sensation of pain for these processes. But when our whole organism becomes a total sensory organ through the exercises indicated, then we initially feel this as pain, as inner mental suffering. Therefore, one must say again and again: He who experiences joy, experiences pleasure, can indeed be grateful to life for this joy and this pleasure. Insights in a deeper sense will not come to him through this. Anyone who has acquired a little knowledge knows how much he owes to the suffering and pain that ordinary life has already given him; so that these sufferings and pains have prepared him to now, in inner self-education to living thinking, also to experience the sufferings and pains that precisely this living thinking prepares for man, because he is precisely placed in the outer world. By experiencing reality in suffering, we experience the spiritual world, which we now grasp with living thought, with the same degree of reality with which we experience the sensual world through our senses. In this way we become entirely spiritual sensory organs, if I may use this paradoxical, self-contradictory, but very real expression, and only as a whole human being can we become that. Then we perceive the spiritual world in its reality. Then we know how the living thought is just as much a reality as we know how to distinguish in ordinary life between a piece of hot iron that we really grasp with our fingers and one that we merely imagine in our minds.

Thus, in order to grasp the higher, supersensible world, these two things belong together: that the living thought is experienced in man, and that through inner, soul pain, his whole being is permeated with inner sensitivity. The thought must become alive – the whole human being must become sensitive to those moments in his life when he wants to seek a connection to the spiritual world. We see that as modern people, we remain entirely in the soul realm. We do not turn to the process of strengthening consciousness through regular or irregular breathing. Nor do we turn to the process of paralyzing our bodily functions. We remain entirely in the soul with our exercises, but on another level we develop the same thing that was developed through yoga practice and through asceticism for the vision of the higher world. We develop these higher insights and yet remain human beings who can fully face robust life, who, as neither men of insight nor men of action, do not have to retreat into hermitage. Why is that? We only perform inner soul exercises, but as a result we arrive at the invigorated thought, which the Indian yogi only achieved by letting the stronger current flow into the other of breathing. And on the other hand, purely inwardly, we arrive at the soul, which in a certain way becomes a kind of downgrading of physical processes. But we now have both in hand. We can, for example, keep suffering to the soul alone and we can return to our healthy soul and body state whenever we wake up from sleep. For it must be emphasized again and again that what is important in anthroposophical methods is that we can return from that state, which leads us into the spiritual world, to that state where we stand with both feet on the earth.

But when one has succeeded in enlivening thinking in this way, then one knows that one has something quite different from what the much-mocked natural philosophy once had. Oken and Schelling also came to a living thinking. And anyone who reads Schelling's works today will notice that there is something in them that is not a dead thought, that is a living thought. But what Schelling does not express is what makes his living thinking different from the mere image of such thinking. It is different because of what I have added, which testifies that we have become a sense organ with our whole being: the pains, the sufferings that one recognizes as a necessity when higher knowledge is to arise in man. Therefore, one can say, such knowledge as seems to be present in Schelling gives only a kind of inner soul voluptuousness, while the knowledge I mean is quite serious when the question arises: how can one bear it?

And yet another difference arises between anthroposophical knowledge and Schelling's. When we acquire knowledge through ordinary science or speculative philosophy, we are accustomed to the fact that once we have it, it remains with us, becoming memory images. I would like to say: it is not as easy as that with anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, because it is a living thing. Once one has gained access to a certain area of the world in the manner indicated, in order to look into the spiritual, No matter how strong the experience and how powerful the vision at a given moment, after a short time it has faded away, like a dream that has gone cold. And if one wants to revive it, one must awaken it again within oneself, for one has just entered the sphere of the living. And just as no one in the sphere of the living can say that what has gone before makes what comes after unnecessary – for example, that if you have eaten once eight days ago, you do not need to eat again after eight days – so it is here too: that the knowledge you have acquired in the spiritual life must be gained again and again. This gives the soul life a certain disposition in relation to the supersensible world: the disposition that the spiritual shows itself to be alive by having to be grasped again and again by the living forces in order to be there for the consciousness. In short, one lives one's way into the supersensible world by experiencing the reality of this spiritual world at the same time, just as one lives one's way into a reality through the senses.

But then, when one has developed this living thinking within oneself, permeated by inner sensitivity and inner capacity for feeling, then one no longer faces the person one is dealing with in the same way as with dead thinking. In dead thinking, the peculiarity is that we have this person before us, we form certain ideas about him, which we then carry within us. But all these ideas do not extend beyond the space enclosed by the person's skin. If, on the other hand, we look at the person with living thinking, then a spiritual person is added to the physical-sensory view of the person, which in turn is structured within itself. We look at the person in their physical form. But this appears to us as enclosed in a spiritual shell, and this spiritual shell points us back to earlier earthly lives. We see how the present life on earth, in which the present form is being lived out, is a repetition of a previous life on earth. And we come to see the person in such a way that we recognize what he experienced in the spiritual world during the time between his previous death and the beginning of his present earthly existence. We look at the spiritual and soul nature of man as it was before descending into the physical world, and see how the activity of the spiritual and soul nature, which does not yet have a body, developed, how it is directed towards penetrating with a full, and now spiritual consciousness, the secrets of the human body. We now realize the profound meaning of the saying, 'Man is a small world'. For this small world is small only in space compared to the great world of the cosmos. It contains not only the secrets of the cosmos. It contains far more than can be seen with ordinary eyes in the cosmos, as we survey the external cosmos with the intellect and direct our gaze into it so that we can recognize it or act in it. Thus the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, lives in a spiritual world before conception, and his gaze is directed to the human organization, to the human being as he is enclosed here with his spiritual-soul being in his skin. That is the world one lives through between death and a new birth, and we look at this world through what - if one may use this expression - we see like a spiritual aura on and through the human being, and what points us to the world he lived through before his earthly existence.

And we look at the other structure through which it is expressed to us how the person acts in front of us. If we observe with our ordinary intellect how one person meets another in life, then we may attribute it to so-called coincidence if we notice that this encounter has a deeper meaning for the person. If we notice that this encounter, perhaps by bringing these two people together, is decisive for their whole life on earth, we may still attribute it only to chance that these two found each other. But if we look at it with strengthened thinking that guarantees reality, then we recognize how the whole life of these two people moved with a certain magic, and that one of them finally came into the other's field of vision because the other was sympathetic to him. It becomes a certainty, as sensitive people say to themselves when they reach a certain age, as Goethe's friend Knebel put it, for example: When I look back on my life, it seems to me as if I had wanted it out of unconscious, inner desires. It turns out that what wants to come out in a person's destiny binds us together in our inner being with the being of the other.

This is where we come to what the ancient ascetics, the yoga people, called karma, how destiny develops in connection with successive earthly lives. Today, this still seems paradoxical to many people. But anyone who takes seriously the question of how the reality of living thinking can be substantiated will, after all, form a conception of the connection between human destiny and that which one develops as higher, supersensible powers of knowledge. Just as one can say that what lives in the world of colors is unknown to the blindborn, but that the world of colors must not be denied because of this, so for higher knowledge the connection between human destiny and repeated earthly lives does not appear to contradict human freedom. When one considers human freedom, it might appear that it has nothing to do with such a view of karma and repeated earthly lives. But it is not so. For example, I am not unfree because I build a house this year and move into it the next year. But I am no more unfree because I develop certain powers in me and that these then seek their ways in earthly life. It remains, as with the construction of a house, still the freedom of the human being. But through such an insight, one sees how what human action is is the second link in the human aura. And through this one gains an insight into that part of us that works incessantly as the human being is active in the physical world. Not only the ordinary powers of perception live in it, but also that which the human being can otherwise feel in relation to his digestion, for example. In this way, man now sees what he experiences from day to day, what enriches his life, through which he becomes greater and greater – in the spiritual sense this is now meant, of course – and what then goes into the spiritual world through death: He sees the mystery of death.

This is the anthroposophical path to the spiritual world. And this path also explains why those who do not want to go it now condemn it, as we see today. They have an unconscious fear of what must one day be overcome in a higher realization, of suffering, of what brings human functions to a certain calm, but a calm that is under an inner domination. They therefore prefer to see visions and so forth arising from a down-tuned corporeality, as in the medium, but which have no cognitive value. While a cognitive value arises from not experiencing what is worked through the outer corporeality, but what is experienced from the inner soul, but as a certain suffering, which guarantees the certainty of the supersensible world.

And since the path to the supersensible world is sought in this way, its results must also be communicated in such a way that the whole presentation is an expression of the seriousness that must be shown by those who want to go up the path into the spiritual world and from there want to bring knowledge about this spiritual world to other people. The idea must take hold among people today that the messages about the spiritual world can be proclaimed by those who walk this path, and that the secret of birth and death can be revealed through it. People must be able to arise who seek knowledge of the spiritual world, not only of the natural world in natural science. And just as one does not have to be a painter to feel the beauty of a natural phenomenon, one does not have to be a spiritual researcher to feel the value of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the supersensible world. Only when a relationship has developed in which the spiritual world can be understood in a similar way to how one can understand works of art, even if one is not an artist, only then will the right relationship exist between the spiritual researcher and the non-spiritual researcher, just as the right relationship already exists today between astronomer and non-astronomer.

And spiritual science will establish the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and those who want to take up spiritual research. And since this relationship is directed towards truth, truth must also be felt if people allow their sense of truth and common sense to prevail, which is also the aim of the spiritual researcher's messages. But then, when such a relationship exists between spiritual research and this life, as I have just described, then that which can bring the spiritual impulses of this spiritual science into a real life practice will stand up for life. What do we have from the spiritual world today? We have thoughts from the spiritual world, we live in thoughts and ideas, but as I have characterized them, they are actually dead. But if one is able to infuse anthroposophical spiritual science into these ideas, then it gives life to these thoughts and ideas. As a result, the people who are able to understand these anthroposophical thoughts are themselves inwardly spiritually enlivened.

Do we have spirit in our present culture? We may say: we have spirit in the sense that we have developed beautiful, great thoughts from the spirit. But in these thoughts the living spirit is not present. Anthroposophy does not want to develop thoughts about the spirit, but to pour the living thought itself into people as spiritual blood, so that they are permeated with spiritual blood in their spiritual nature just as they are permeated with physical blood in their physical nature. Then, however, we will succeed in permeating our whole life with spirit again, but not just with thoughts and abstractions from spirit, but with living ideas of this spirit. Then, however, the great questions of life, especially the social questions, will be solved in a completely different way when we can say: We not only have thoughts of the spiritual, but the spiritual world itself walks among us. It is there where we ourselves are as physical human beings. But because we — each of us in our physical body — carry a spiritual being within us, we are companions of spiritual beings that walk among us. We will relate to the world quite differently, and the great riddles of the present and the near future will present themselves to us in a completely different way when we stop having only dead spirit in our thoughts, but when we can say again: We humans are not alone on earth, we do not just harbor thoughts of a spirit in us, which, as thoughts, are unproven and lead on the one hand to superstition and on the other to doubt. For out of certainty we can say: We are not alone on earth, spiritual beings are among us, are connected with us, spiritual beings take care of the course of the world with us, and we take care of the course of the world when we enter into a relationship with them!

Thus, anthroposophy does not seek the spirit, which often proves to be a dead thing in life and can only give us a gloomy picture of the future. Rather, anthroposophy turns to the living spirit, so that people may not only have ideas about the spirit, but may have the living spirit walking among them!