The Essence of Anthroposophy

GA 80a — 16 May 1922, Mannheim

Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

Dear attendees! The remarks that I will be presenting here today require a certain premise if they are to appear justified in the present – I would like to say – in our scientific age. This premise is the examination of what must currently be recognized as scientifically possible. I took the liberty of discussing in my last lecture, which I had the honor of giving here a few months ago, what needs to be said in this regard, what Anthroposophy asserts about its relationship to the scientific world view of the present day, how it is not in opposition to it at all, but fully recognizes its significance, and how it, in turn, goes further than this science. And since I may well assume that a large part of today's honored audience was also present at the time, it seems to me neither possible nor necessary to repeat what was said then. I will simply take it for granted and build on it what Anthroposophy now has to say through its research, through its knowledge of the relationship between man and the spiritual world.

When we speak as human beings of the difficulties we face when enigmatic questions arise about the spiritual world, when we speak of such difficulties, these difficulties cannot relate to the existence of a spiritual world as such, to which the human being feels connected in his earthly existence. For man needs only to reflect on himself, and he lives in a spiritual world. Through his spirit, he is cognitively related to the things around him, to the actions he performs himself. And even the most ardent materialist does not deny this relationship of man to the spiritual world, insofar as man is always aware of his spirit in the waking state. The difficulty only begins when man looks at the nature of this spirit, in that he can actually see his human dignity, his true human value, only through it. Man must indeed say to himself: I have the spirit. As I said, even the worst materialist does not deny that. At most, he believes that what man experiences as spirit within himself is a product, a creature of material existence. And precisely because man feels himself to be a spirit, because he senses his value and dignity in this spiritual realm, he must ask: What is this essence of the spirit, how is it grounded perhaps in an all-encompassing spiritual world that does not belong to the transitory, but which is permanent in the face of the transitory? With this, I would like to point out to you, dear listeners, the inner soul difficulties that man feels himself confronted with every day and every hour when he looks at the essence of his own spirituality. These difficulties, people do not always bring them to their full awareness in the full sense of the word. But they live in the depths of the soul, whether one explores them or not, they live in these depths of the soul, flow up into the conscious soul existence, make up the happiness and suffering of the innermost human being, make up the innermost destiny of the human being, form the soul mood and soul condition. In this way, the human being finds his way into the world and becomes useful to his fellow human beings and the world to the extent that he can educate himself, even if unconsciously and naively, about the nature of the spirit. And from many subsoils, the riddle questions in this regard arise, and I could cite many things that live in the soul consciously or more or less unconsciously.

I would like to highlight two examples from all that is present in the soul, two examples that perhaps do not even belong to the most common ones, but which can show precisely what corners of his soul life a person encounters when he wants to educate himself about the spirit. Every day, when we pass from the waking state to the sleeping state, we see how our inner spiritual activity, our inner spiritual activity, how that paralyzes itself, dawns down into an indefinite darkness, how the time of sleep occurs, in relation to which we cannot say what it actually is with our inner spiritual-soul activity and activity. Then we feel – one may well say – the powerlessness of that which is our spirituality. We live in this spirituality from waking up to falling asleep; we actually feel truly human when we live in this spirituality, but we see it fade away, dim, and are powerless in the face of this everyday disappears from us, from that which is truly human in us, and without us always feeling it – as I said – from the unconscious experience of this powerlessness comes that which gives us insecurity about the nature and destiny of our mind. And that is one side.

The other is, I would say, the polar opposite. We experience it again more or less unconsciously — unconsciously in most people — when we pass from the sleeping state to the waking state, at most with the transition through more or less chaotic dreams, but we know from healthy reason that they have only an illusory value compared to what we call in ordinary life the reality of existence. With this transition through the dream life, we take possession of our physical body with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we grasp our senses, how the outside world is reflected in our senses in its colors, sounds, and so on, and we experience this inwardly. We inwardly experience how we grasp our willpower and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in the last lecture from a different point of view, what darkness are we actually looking down into when we have only a simple willpower, when we decide to raise our arm and move our hand? We have this thought, and then we see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm. But how the thought flows down into the organism, what complicated processes are involved before the hand is moved, all this disappears from our consciousness. When we wake up, we take hold of our body with our spirit, but what this spirit experiences down there is shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that in this waking state, too, we have only an indeterminate relationship to our spirituality and its relation to the outer world – to the outer world that we ourselves are through our body – which presents us with a mystery. On the one hand, we feel the powerlessness of the spirit; on the other hand, we feel it sinking into our own inner darkness when we wake up. From such experiences, man forms the riddle questions about the nature of spirituality, and then two opponents of the soul life stand before this spiritual world, to which man strives with his knowledge, with his will, two enemies, one of whom clouds this spiritual world for him, the other threatens to take it from him. One enemy strikes precisely those who, even in our present existence, still live more or less naively in the face of our scientific worldviews, accepting many traditional ideas into their worldview without examination, often as the worst illusions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, because they feel that they cannot truly live in mental health without such ideas about the spiritual. Then they give themselves over to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All kinds of soul-forms stream out of the human life of will and place themselves before the human spirit, wanting to tell it what underlies the external world as spiritual reality. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness and methodology of the present time very easily succumb to such ideas, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we understand the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as decisive for the supersensible, then we go to recognize the outer world. We find obstacles at every turn when trying to orient ourselves in the external world. We believe that this or that must apply in the sense world because we accept it through our superstition. External nature does not confirm what we assume in our superstitious experience at every turn. This leads us to a certain reorientation towards this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become unsure of ourselves, and because we become unsure of ourselves, we lose the ability to develop strong impulses for our actions. We become unfit for our own actions, we become unfit for interaction with other people.

That, dear attendees, is the one enemy that arises in the human soul when faced with the riddles of the spiritual world. The other enemy appears primarily to those souls who enter into the modern way of scientific life. They learn to recognize how to develop their thinking in a conscientious, methodical, one might say exact, way in order to follow sense phenomena to their external laws and to permeate them with ideas through which they become understandable. But it is very often the case, especially when one is conscientiously immersed in the external world in this way, that one notices how our thinking becomes, I might say, thin through this scientific path, how it only gradually becomes appropriate to what the sensory world is, and how, in its thinness, it cannot find its way up from the sensory to the supersensible realm, precisely because of its conscientiousness. And then precisely those who enter deeply into the scientific sphere are assailed by doubt, the other enemy of the human soul life. Doubt is certainly something that is connected with the development and education of the intellect. But when doubt presents itself to the human intellect, then it sinks down into the soul, it sinks down into the mind. Those who, on the basis of the deeper insights that anthroposophy can provide, now recognize the connection between the life of the soul and the physical experience of the human being, know how what takes place in the soul pours into the body and how that which — one must put it this way — rushes from doubt into the , how it first causes a certain wasting disease of the soul life in the person, how this wasting disease can weaken us — I would say — to the marrow, to the limbs, to the muscles, that we can become unfit for our soul, for our spiritual and for our physical activity precisely because of doubt. Precisely because this is experienced by modern man from one side or the other, perhaps the worst doubters feel particularly compelled to seek information about the spiritual, about the supersensible, to which they do not want to turn out of traditional belief, like the first type of person, who surrender to superstition. Since they want to turn to the supersensible realm through knowledge, scientific minds are led to study the abnormal spiritual life, the spiritual life of attuned people, mediums, people who have all kinds of hallucinations. It is seen that something else is going on in the abnormal life than in the normal human life of knowledge and will, and it is believed that something can be drawn from this abnormal life, which comes from mediumship or from visions, about human abilities and their connection with another world into the realm of ordinary consciousness.

Those who are familiar with anthroposophy know that all these outlets are from the pathological realm, from a diseased soul life. The soul life of a medium is diseased because their physical life must be attuned down at the moment when they are acting as a medium. This detuning makes it impossible for the person acting as a medium to grasp what his soul is directly experiencing. It is impossible to verify — even for an external observer, who may have a sound mind when observing the medium — it is impossible to realize what kind of relationship the person, the medium, has to another world if one is not immersed in this experience. The medium is, after all, singled out and, with his healthy human understanding, distracted from what he is experiencing in his mediumistic states. Whenever a person has hallucinations, we can always show how these have their roots in a diseased area of the human body and how what arises in the soul as other experiences can only be there because of this diseased part of the human organization. Thus we have no possibility of finding the transition we are seeking from the healthy human soul life to a knowledge of the supersensible, of the spiritual realm. For wherever we turn to the sick soul life, we lack control at every step. And so most of our contemporaries feel compelled to cling to time-honored, traditional ideas when it comes to the supersensible, to the spiritual, to that which has developed from earlier epochs of humanity into our time as the content of creeds and worldviews.

One then tends towards these world-view contents, which go right into our philosophies – people do not even realize how this is the case even in the philosophies that are considered to be unprejudiced by some great thinkers, but they are not – one holds, as they say, with the belief in that which they cannot achieve with knowledge, with insight. And today we have already come so far as to construct all kinds of artificial concepts to justify faith as something that must stand independently in the face of knowledge, in the face of knowledge, which is only supposed to be directed towards our sensual or the like, while faith alone may be directed towards the supersensible. But this supersensible realm is taken from what has been handed down traditionally and has an effect on people with the strength with which it often does so today, through its venerable age. But if we look impartially at what people believe and what they hold in terms of worldviews that have been handed down historically, we can trace this in real history — not just in the history that is recognized today, but in a history that is steeped in psychology and the study of the soul. There one sees that what one wants to believe today, what one accepts as an idea in its effect on the world of feeling, that in older epochs of humanity this was once entirely derived from insights that the individual human being gained out of his need for knowledge, on paths that were to lead him into the supersensible. Everything that is justified as religious belief today can in fact be traced back to ancient knowledge.

At some point, an individual or that person's community found their way, through special inner spiritual paths, into the supersensible world, received ideas from this supersensible world, grasped them with their ordinary consciousness and passed them on to their fellow human beings. Their fellow human beings recognized that through such paths of knowledge one could discover something about the supersensible world. Such earlier paths of knowledge may be primitive compared to what is needed today for us humans in such paths of knowledge. But it is not acceptable for the truly unbiased person to overlook the fact that one cannot help but notice how the beliefs of today go back to such old paths of knowledge, whose source of knowledge has only been forgotten. And if you explore them, sometimes through external history, through some kind of document, then you feel disturbed because you no longer devote yourself to such sources of knowledge; you say: That is good for an earlier civilization and culture. Yes, but – my dear audience – today we believe what comes from these sources of knowledge, we have only somehow changed it in terms, but its true content goes back to such sources.

My dear attendees, anthroposophy, as I understand it, offers people a path of knowledge into the supersensible world, and we will have more to say about this anthroposophical path of knowledge, as it is appropriate for today's people. But we will be able to communicate more easily today if we look at older paths of knowledge, which I mentioned in my last lecture, and the results of which are available to the naive and often also to the learned person today when it comes to the supersensible.

I would like to characterize two of the old paths of knowledge here before you. There is also the possibility of characterizing countless other such paths of knowledge, but I want to pick out two because they are particularly characteristic, and because to a large extent people have forgotten how much of what people today take in as beliefs comes precisely from these sources.

I would like to mention first – as I said, just so that we are all on the same page, not because I would like to recommend such a path of knowledge to anyone, but because it is by understanding the old that we can ascend to the knowledge of the new – I would like to mention first the path that is well known, the path that was taken in ancient India to gain knowledge of a different world from the one that usually surrounds people.

I would first like to characterize what is called the ancient yoga system of knowledge, which was once sacred in the Orient but has now degenerated. The yoga system of knowledge leads, I would say, to its kind of erudition, to its kind of knowledge of another world. What were the essential elements of this yoga system? I would like to mention the characteristic that is questionable today when it is practiced – at the time it was not questionable, but the way it is practiced today is questionable – because it is no longer appropriate for today's human nature, because human nature has changed since the times when the yoga practice was performed. What could be done in ancient times without harming human nature, and was done in ancient times, say, by the Indians, cannot be done today, especially by Westerners, without harming their body and mind. But let us agree on this. The essential and purely essential thing, among other things, in the practice of yoga is a modified breathing in addition to the ordinary everyday breathing of a person.

How does this everyday breathing process take place? More or less unconsciously. Only when we are somehow affected by illness do we become aware of our breathing. Otherwise, inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling take place to a great extent unconsciously. And it is precisely on this unconsciousness of inhaling, holding our breath, and exhaling that the unbiased matter-of-factness of our life is based. Those who believed in ancient Orient that they could become yoga scholars trained for certain periods of time to regulate their breathing differently than nature itself regulates human breathing. They created a different rhythm for inhaling, holding and exhaling. What did they achieve by doing this? He achieved the ability to breathe more or less consciously, while otherwise breathing unconsciously, to experience breathing as a fully conscious process. This happens to me when I breathe in, this happens to me throughout my entire organism during the flow of inhalation, this happens to me during the retention of breath, this during exhalation. In particular, the yogi focused his attention on what now resulted from this altered breathing process, raised into consciousness, for his thinking. For his thinking, what resulted then? Well, we can characterize it physiologically in the modern sense, what happened there. That which unconsciously takes place in the breathing process, what is it in relation to the human head organization, to the thought organization? We breathe in, the respiratory impulse goes into our organism, works up through the spinal cord channel to our brain, to the tool of our thinking, which performs a certain activity out of the nerve-sense life, so that something flows through this activity from the respiratory current. In reality, we are not only dealing with the activity of our nervous sensory life in our thought life, but this nervous sensory life is permeated and permeated by the rhythmic life of the respiratory current. But we know nothing of this. The yogi, who aspired to higher knowledge, brought himself to consciousness of this permeation of the physical part of his thought activity with the respiratory current. What did he attain there? We can only grasp what he attained there by comparing what the yogi experienced in his consciousness with regard to thinking, when we compare that with what his whole environment, the rest of humanity, experienced.

Yes, my dear audience, in the course of historical development, humanity has changed more than we realize today in terms of the life of the soul. What today, I might say, makes up our whole consciousness was quite different in ancient times. Today we see the external world by absorbing the colors through the sense of our eyes in a, I might say, pure way; we hear the external world through the sense of the ear, absorbing the sounds in a certain purity, and it is the same with the other sensations. It was not like that in ancient times. We misunderstand the senses of early humanity if we say that they fantasized their way into the world, as animism would have it. It was not like that. Early humans naturally experienced what was in the outer world as a living spiritual soul striving up within them. And by looking at lightning and thunder, at the hurrying clouds, at the streaming wind, springs, plants and animals, they saw everything that surrounded people in the outer world. They saw not only a colorful, warm, cold or otherwise sensually shaped world, as we do today. No, they saw a world in which every spring was permeated by the spiritual soul, in every breath of wind that played around them, in the stars, in the sun and moon they felt how the spiritual soul expressed itself. It was just as natural for people to see this spiritual soul as it is natural for us to see colors and hear sounds. That was the usual experience of the people around the yogi. The yogi, however, wanted to experience a different world than the one they usually experienced. That is why he undertook the exercises I have just described. And by driving the conscious flow of breath through his thinking through these exercises, I would say, he made something completely different out of his thinking.

Indeed, the person who immersed himself in this way, seeing a spiritual soul in every spring, in every breath of wind, in everything that is nature, did not have the strong ego, the strong self-confidence that the present man has. strong sense of self that the present-day man has. He could not feel the strong spiritual element in his own self. In a sense, his being merged with the outer world, which was a spiritual element for him, just as his inner being was a spiritual element for him. When the yogi, breathing in this way, transformed his thinking, then his experience was that he attained an insight similar to our own, but by this path of knowledge; he made his thinking strong, he led it into the abstract. In this way he perceived the spirituality of his own self. And he felt this self rooted in another world, in a world that is eternal.

And all the wonderful things that were said in older times about the spiritual world were said from the experience that man, in the way described, came to the self, to the I, that he felt his I as his eternal spirituality connected to the universal spirituality of the world. And if you read the most beautiful chapters in the wonderful poetry of the Bhagavad Gita, you will read how it is described in such a wonderful way how man comes to his self and to the experience of the spiritual world, and you will feel transported to the special spiritual path of those ancient times. Much of what has been revealed to man in this way about the human self, about human spirituality and its relationship to world spirituality, lives in many of today's traditional creeds, in today's traditional world views, and even in the philosophies that one believes one can approach without prejudice. People do not realize how much of what they have adopted in their belief in authority comes from the experiences of the ancient yogi.

Those who today want to educate themselves about the meaning of today's yoga systems usually come to something wrong and believe that by applying such a method they can still achieve something special today. This is not the case. People will harm themselves, both mentally and physically, if they want to resurrect on their path of knowledge that which was appropriate for an ancient humanity. But even with regard to that which is necessary for today's human being to attain higher knowledge — and which we want to discuss later, also in order to communicate about it — such a characteristic of old, no longer useful paths of knowledge cannot serve us. I would like to say that, on the other hand, the opposite reveals itself to us as an example when we look at an older path of knowledge, the one that was walked in asceticism, a path of knowledge that we can no longer walk today.

We cannot have the yoga path. We cannot follow the yoga path because the person who lives in his breathing in the way described, and then lives in the thinking that is permeated by breathing, becomes so highly sensitive that he can no longer endure the robust external world to any great extent. Because of this sensitivity, he must withdraw from the outer world, he must surrender to a certain solitude, even hermitage. But it was precisely in the views of the ancients that they sought wisdom about higher worlds precisely from those who did not experience as they did, but who isolated themselves, so to speak, in the corner, in order to strive in this solitude into the higher world, in order to explore that which is supersensible in human nature, in order to be able to proclaim it to others. Today, the healthy person cannot relate to human natures that seek solitude and hermitage in this way. Modern life makes such tough demands that we have to find our way into it in its liveliness, and the modern person can only have trust in the one who does not need to withdraw from life, but who places himself in life as much as anyone else. Therefore, we cannot use the yoga path. It would not inspire trust in those who understand themselves within modern cultural development.

The same applies to the old ascetic path. What does the ascetic do in the old sense of the word? He downgrades his bodily functions, he paralyzes them to a certain extent. His physical organism should be less active in those periods when he should be open to higher knowledge than he would be if he were to devote himself externally to a robust life. Through this attunement of bodily functions, the person striving for a higher life experiences and realizes that, yes, for the life we lead outwardly, this body we carry is suitable and appropriate, and we may not really wish for a different body, and so there is no need for the bodily functions to be slowed down. But if we want to look into the spiritual world, then this body, which is constituted for the sensual world, is an obstacle. If we degrade it, make it less active than it is in ordinary life, then we remove the obstacle and the supersensible world flows into our consciousness. This is simply what the ancients experienced: the body is an obstacle to the knowledge of higher worlds. On the other hand, it was the case that by attuning the physical body to pain and suffering in order to come into contact with the spiritual world, the ascetic entered into an inner experience that took him away from the robust outer world into solitude, into hermitage. From there he was able to explore many things that then sank deep into the human soul when the soul wanted to know: How am I connected to the spiritual worlds, how do I find the happiness of my mind?

But then again, the people who could say such things — and this goes right back to our present-day religious beliefs and world views, without people being aware of it —, then again the people had to tune down the functions of their physicality in relation to the robust outer life, they had to develop a hypersensitivity to this life, to loneliness, to hermitage. The old path of asceticism, which has also been corrupted today, is not suitable for modern man. Through such asceticism, man first of all makes himself alien to reality, in which we must fully place ourselves today, but he also makes himself unfit for his actions, he makes himself unfit for working for the benefit of his fellow human beings. But we can still look at the two paths by which people once struggled to gain an insight into the supersensible worlds.

How a person today can raise themselves in the supersensible world, my dear listeners, is something that I described in my last lecture here, at least in principle. You can find it described in full detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science” and in other books of mine. But there you will see that today's man can no longer follow the path of, say, a reorganization of his breathing, the path of conscious breathing, in order to change his thought life in the sense that ordinary views of man become the wonderful world view of the Bhagavad Gita. I would say that for his path of knowledge, for his path of thought, man started from something that was still entirely appropriate for those ancient times, something that was intimately connected with his bodily functions.

All that I described to you in the previous lecture, and what I describe in my books, are processes that are not carried out in breathing, that are not carried out in this way in the body, but that are carried out in the life of thought itself, in the inner life of the soul, through a special training in meditation, through a special training in the concentration of thought, in contemplation. Today's exercises, which are intended to lead to the higher world, are done through practices that are carried out in the regulation of thinking itself. The ancient Indian yogi regulated his breathing; we regulate our ordinary thinking directly, we bring a different rhythm, a different inner lawfulness into meditation and concentration in thinking. We do not approach a transformation of our thinking indirectly through breathing, we go straight to the thinking. Of course, I cannot repeat all the exercises that you can read about in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and “Occult Science”; I can only hint at the principles in this way.

But what do we achieve by doing such exercises, which address human thoughts so intimately? Through them we come to see through what we have today as our ordinary thinking, through birth and upbringing, in its abstractness, in its deadness, if I may express it so. We arrive at essentially enlivening thinking, whereas the ancient Indian yogi — I might say — started from a certain liveliness of thinking, from which he went away to abstract thinking, to the thinking that we have as a matter of course in life. There he experienced the self. Now, we have this self through birth and upbringing; we have to, by grasping thinking, not breathing, enliven this thinking. But in doing so, we come to perceive ordinary thinking precisely as the abstract, as the dead, and to move on to a living thinking through inner exercises.

This is the significant transformation that the modern seeker of knowledge who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds, into the world of the spiritual, must undergo. This is the method that the modern seeker of knowledge must go through, which leads from abstract, from inanimate, from dead thinking to inwardly living thinking.

And now I would like to give you a characterization of modern forms of consciousness, where we arrive when we acquire this living thinking. I will point out something that is close to every person today. If we have any connection at all with today's worldviews, we realize how a so-called higher animal is constituted, how its functions, its bodily processes work. We form an inner image of this higher animal in our thoughts. In doing so, we visualize the nature of this animal. But then we may turn to the human being. We form an inner picture of the human being again, using all the material that science provides us with today. Later it will be even more complete, but in principle no different, as long as thinking is applied only in the abstract, as it is today in the study of natural laws — we form an image of the human being, of the structure of the bones, the structure of the muscles, the structure of the other organs, of the interweaving and interflowing of the inner bodily processes. Then we compare this picture with the picture we have of higher animals and we find a certain relationship. Depending on whether we think more or less materialistically, we imagine that man then emerges physically from the higher animal. If we think more idealistically or spiritually, we imagine this relationship differently. But we look at it by forming the idea of the higher animal on the one hand and the idea of man on the other and comparing them, we form something through this comparison, which is then to become our world view of our environment. But now let us ask ourselves a question that may interest us. What is the difference between thinking, with which one compares the concept of the higher animal with the concept of man, as one can outwardly compare a higher animal with a lower animal, the lower animal with a plant. Let us ask ourselves the question: What is the difference between this dead abstract thinking and that living thinking that one acquires through the modern exercises of knowledge for the supersensible world?

If we form an idea with our ordinary thinking about the higher animal, about its inner structure, about its processes, about the intermingling of its life processes, then, I would say, we have inwardly visualized the being of this higher animal through a thought. But the thought lives, and this thought changes inwardly, if it lives, without us having to look at it. It forms the thought of the human being out of itself, it undergoes this metamorphosis inwardly. With dead thinking, we can only form the thought of the higher animal, then go over with our thinking to the human being, to the human being whom we experience outwardly, find human thought, but with animal thought we never come to human thought. Simply by allowing the thought to come to life in us, through which the human thought then arises from the animal thought, we arrive at a different, a spiritual relationship to the world.

I would like to illustrate it in the following way. Consider a magnetic needle. You can point it in many different directions. Only one direction is the excellent one, the direction that points from the magnetic north pole to the magnetic south pole. This one line is the excellent one. Wherever you point the magnetic needle, you do not have such an excellent direction. By its own natural law, this magnetic needle belongs in the north-south direction. Thus, through the living thought, the whole space is differentiated. In living thinking, we do not have the space of indifferent juxtaposition, the calculative space, but we experience the space in which something else becomes the vertical line that goes from the earth to the stars; the horizontal line that is the tangent of the ground on which we stand. Space is experienced inwardly by the living thought.

Then we turn to the higher animal, we find its backbone line horizontal, and where this line goes into the vertical, are the exceptions that show that what I say is right. We see the vertical direction in the human being, we feel that this line is different from the one the animal maintains with its backbone, and we feel this line, in which the human being now places himself, and many other things that we have to change when we move from animal thought to human thought. We feel that a different being is emerging, and by seizing the animal thought, we have to keep the form flexible and know: if we enter into a different spatial direction, we come to a different being. We allow one thought to arise from the other in our inner experience.

Consider, my dear audience, how alive our soul life becomes, how spiritualized our soul life becomes, while we juxtapose one with the other with the dead abstract thought, how we stand before the world, how we now become similar to the interweaving, the growth and becoming of external things with our inner experience, how we immerse ourselves in the outer world, no longer merely standing beside it.

This is the first step for modern man. To bring abstract, dead thinking to life, and in so doing, to live in the spirituality of the world. But all of you – my dear audience – can raise a significant objection as I describe this living thinking. You can object that there have been all kinds of thinkers, natural philosophers Oken, Schelling, who have had such living thinking in a certain sense; they have known how to grasp the thought of an external object in a certain imaginative way and have understood how to transform it in order to find something that then coincides with another thing of its own accord. And modern humanity has indeed recognized how much fantasy there is in Schelling and Oken precisely because of this thinking. But there is something that anthroposophy must add to what the most recent ancient times did not have. When such thinkers as those mentioned describe what actually takes place in their spiritual life, one does not find what anthroposophical research and experience must point to.

The person who, as I have described it, forms thoughts about the things of the external world, who is himself alive, cannot take a step with this living thought without feeling pain inwardly, in a certain way suffering. And now, when this living thought is felt as suffering, as pain – not initially in the physical sense, for it can only be transmitted in that direction – now something begins that can be felt as reality. Anyone who comes to realize that higher knowledge in the modern sense can only be attained by going through suffering and pain will always tell you something about their ordinary life as well: they will say, “What I have experienced as happiness, as joy, as good fortune, I am grateful to my destiny for. What I have had in the way of suffering, pain, disappointment and privation in my ordinary life, I owe to the little knowledge that I have gained. And the fact that I have gained such knowledge through the ordinary pains and disappointments that life has given me means that I have undergone preliminary training for that which must be experienced when the living thought, as living spirituality, fills the soul, is therefore also alive in the soul, and therefore also drives the soul to suffering and pain.

What is achieved by this? Through this our whole human nature becomes an organ of perception – the expression sounds paradoxical – but now not an organ of perception that, like the eye and ear, perceives the outer world, but it becomes an organ of perception that spiritually perceives itself within and also looks into the spiritual world, into the world to which the living thought gives its thought-content, and now truly experiences this living world. One can understand why we have to go through pain and suffering. It is now the case – esteemed attendees – that even in such a perfect structure as the eye, some processes, changes take place due to the light acting on it. These changes that take place, if we had a fine sense for it, we would have a sensation of pain, and this sensation of pain would only change into the sensation of color. And in the earliest times of human development, this was what man had. Sensory perception arose out of pain, man became robust against it, became neutral, today he experiences the sensory perception directly; that which underlies the pain withdraws from perception. But if we are to live our way up into the spiritual world, we must force our way through suffering and pain, and only when we have overcome these, when we have turned suffering, pain to our advantage, can we glimpse into the spiritual world, which is opened up to us on the one hand through the living thought. And then, after we have transformed our whole organism into a sense organ by bringing thought to life and overcoming the suffering, we see ourselves, as a modern human being, facing the spiritual world with understanding, with science.

We can now seek spiritual knowledge for ourselves, and we do not need to withdraw from life into a hermitage. We can immerse ourselves in life, our outer physicality does not lead us to asceticism, our outer physicality remains as it is, and can therefore robustly face the external world and fulfill all the demands that today's life places on modern people. In this way we can create an understanding of the spiritual world by remaining in this world, in which modern man must one day remain. But when we create such insights, then man certainly approaches us in a different way than he approaches us when we merely look at him with our sensory eyes. Usually we perceive only the external physicality of this human form. But the person who has struggled to the mobile, living thoughts does not just see this outer, sensual human form; he sees something spiritual and soul-like in this human form, an auric, a spiritual and soul-like aura. The word “aura” is to be understood only in this sense, not in any superstitious sense. One beholds the auric in which the human form is embedded, but one does not only recognize in this aura that which stands externally in front of one, but one looks at that which the person already was in his spiritual-soul before he descended from a spiritual-soul world. One gets to know the person through their auric being, which reveals itself through the kind of contemplation that I have characterized as a spiritual-soul being, and one learns to look back into the spiritual-soul world, into one's preexistence, into the life that one had before one entered one's earthly life. And one does not just learn in such abstractness that the person truly lived in a spiritual-soul world before his birth, one also gets to know the concrete of this spiritual-soul human being, that is, our self, as we get to know the outer world through sensory perception.

I can characterize this in the following way. While we are here between birth and death, we look out into the outer world, we look up into the cosmos, admire the stars, admire the glory of the sun and moon; we look at the kingdoms of nature, we see more and more of the wonderful laws that live in all of this through our science. But by looking out there and looking back at ourselves in an unbiased way, at what is within us, we have to say to ourselves: Dark is what the human being sees between birth and death in the ordinary consciousness when he looks into his inner being. We have to say: what lives in there as our organism – certainly, some of it, but only in its deadness, shows anatomy, physiology – but anthroposophy shows that the human being has a world in there in a completely different sense than ordinary science shows us. When we really get to know what is inside us, we will say to ourselves: Yes, the air we breathe and its inner laws are wonderful, but what goes on in our own lungs as laws is more wonderful than this air circle with all its secrets. The sun is wonderful out there with all the effects that emanate from it, which express themselves in light and warmth, but more wonderful than the light, than the currents of warmth, more wonderful than all that is what lives inside the human organism, in the structure of our heart. And so, when we look at the human interior in terms of the bodily organization, we can say to ourselves: great and powerful is the world of external knowledge; greater and more powerful is that which lives in us as a microcosm.

That, my dear audience, is something that one learns to recognize more and more. You can see this from my “Secret Science” and from other of my books. But what is shrouded for the ordinary consciousness between birth and death today ceases to be shrouded when we look at the spiritual and soul nature of the human being before he descended into the physical world. What was man's world while he was a spiritual being in a spiritual world? Not the external world of space, which we otherwise survey, but precisely this human inner world. What is human inner being for the earth is the outer world for our spiritual being.

Just as we have the sun, moon and stars, the three kingdoms of nature around us here, so we have the secrets of the lungs and heart in front of us in the spiritual world, from which we descended. We have the human interior as an external world before us, and there we acquire the ability that is exercised by us human beings to integrate with this physical body. We see the inner laws as an outer world before we descend from the pre-existent life into earthly life; this is the outer world of the spiritual and soul that we experience before conception. And only when we enter the physical body does the outer world appear around us, and the world of the human inner self disappears. What is revealed to us by the one aura is out there.

The other aura that we acquire reveals to us what lives in human actions. Here in the physical world, we look at these actions with our ordinary human consciousness, we see how this or that action is done from childhood on, we see an encounter between people, we see how this encounter shapes the destiny for the whole of the following life, how these people now form a community; as one often says, this appears out of the ordinary consciousness, as a coincidence.

If we acquire the consciousness that leads to the auric, which I have characterized, then it is like the world is for the blind person who has undergone an operation. He used to be unable to perceive colors or lights, but now he can perceive them. Previously, what a person undertook as steps in their life was seen as a matter of chance. But now, after the spiritual eye has been opened, we look at the first steps that a child takes, at the endless sympathies and antipathies, and see how the child develops its life steps more and more. Sympathies and antipathies that arise in him guide the child in the following steps, which become decisive in human life, and we realize how the goal was already present in the sympathies and antipathies that were present in the first childlike steps. In other words, we look at the shaping of human destiny, and in a completely natural, elementary way we become aware when our spiritual eye is opened – just as we realize when we look at an adult that they were a child – we can know that this destiny, which course of life, that people's lives on earth are lived through in repetitions, that the whole of life is cause and effect of other lives between death and a new birth, and that what is fateful carries over from one life to the next.

One might think that this sense of destiny takes away our freedom as human beings. But we do not impair our freedom any more than we impair our freedom by building a house this year and wanting to move into it the next. We only become free by creating such foundations for our lives. Nor do we take away our freedom by building a house for ourselves in this life for the next.

So, my dear attendees, the spiritual world, the relationship of the human being to this spiritual world, is revealed by anthroposophy reopening the paths by which individual people can ascend into the spiritual world and proclaim the results to their fellow human beings. We need a method that can be trusted in the same way as the natural sciences are trusted. In the books mentioned above, I have described how everyone can become a spiritual researcher to a certain extent, and how people can develop such views of the supersensible and spiritual that give them their true value and true human dignity. But people do not necessarily have to become spiritual researchers. Just as one does not need to become an astronomer in order to include astronomical findings in one's knowledge, or a botanist in order to include the necessary botanical findings in one's education, one also does not need to become a spiritual scientist in order to include the findings of spiritual science.

I would like to use another comparison that I have used often, I believe here as well. A person who wants to judge a painted picture in terms of beauty and artistic value does not need to be a painter himself. Man's organization is directed towards truth and beauty. Even someone who is not a spiritual researcher and whose mind is not oriented towards illusions and error can test what the spiritual researcher says with his common sense. And even the spiritual researcher must first test what is revealed to him through his own common sense, just as the other person must do, because the higher vision provides him with a higher world, but not its reality. Just as we first test the dream through common sense, so we must first test the reality of what we see in higher worlds through our common sense. The one who acquires exact clairvoyance — not the old mystical clairvoyance — the one who acquires this modern clairvoyance, finds his way into the spiritual world by means of paths that are entirely appropriate for today's human being, and what he explores there can be thoroughly examined with common sense in the manner indicated.

But what does our civilization gain from this, ladies and gentlemen? Well, what is gained is not unimportant. What is gained can certainly be used. Do we have spirituality today? We have thoughts about the spirit and we live in these thoughts and ideas. But if we look back to older times, it was different. Yes, my dear audience, it was different. We do not want to conjure up old times again, nor do we want to overestimate them. We know that humanity must always move forward; we do not want to bring up in a reactionary way what belongs to a bygone era. But when we look at the ancient epochs from which many unconscious beliefs have come down to us, we see that in those ancient times there were insights through which the spirit was grasped not only in thoughts, but through which the spirit entered the whole human being in a living way. One can say of a person of those times, not only: He has thoughts about the spirit, he has ideas about the spirit, but through his thoughts and ideas the living spirit moves into the human being. Such epochs have existed, and such epochs have actually given the right power and the right impulses for the development of humanity, where it was known that the spirit lives among us, the divinity lives among us. Only then did spiritual knowledge deepen into true religious devotion. If such times can arise again, not in the old form but in the modern form, then the human being acquires a true religious inwardness, an appropriate piety, through deepening their knowledge of anthroposophy. But through this, the modern being gains the knowledge that a time will come when not only, as is the case today, thoughts and ideas live in dryness, but also in the spirituality. Spirituality will move through the living thought. And through the suffering-overcoming conception of reality, the living thought, the living reality, the spirit itself in its liveliness will move into the human being. We must long for such a time because we need it, in which we say to ourselves again: Not only do we exist in the world, we as human beings with our outwardly random actions, but because we human beings ourselves are spiritual , we recognize our relationship to the eternal spirit, we recognize how other spiritual beings are at work beside us, a spiritual world, just like the sensual one, how the spirits not only live in our thoughts, but how they are our fellow travelers in earthly life.

That – dear attendees – when we perceive the spiritual world as the world of our fellow creatures, not as mere abstract theoretical thoughts, then we enter the world that today's humanity, and even more so the humanity of the near future, needs , in order to become more life-affirming, to achieve inner devotion, to achieve fruitful insights, to achieve actions, to achieve impulses for activity, which today's humanity longs for – longs for more than it usually believes.

Today we look into our social life, we see how people long for new impulses to come. But we also see what impulses of doom are indulging themselves. There must be something wrong, and that is what is wrong, that we have lost the living spirit. It is only with this living spirit, which does not merely enter into our scientific, abstract thoughts but permeates our entire human being, that we will solve the great difficult social questions of the present, as far as they can be solved in any age.

Anthroposophy, which is so often rejected, seeks to be nothing other than the spiritual activity, the spiritual life that leads people to recognize and actively embrace this living spirituality, this spiritual co-creation, so that mankind, imbued with this knowledge, with a will, with enthusiasm that comes from this spiritual life, can fully grasp the present and live into the future, as is necessary for the further welfare and development of humanity. Much of this is already sensed by humanity today, but it lives in the unconscious depths of human souls. Anthroposophy seeks to advance to a full understanding of what humanity needs for its inner realization and for its social goals in the present and especially in the future.