What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?

GA 84 — 15 April 1923, Dornach

The Soul Life of Man and its Development Towards Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition

Yesterday I tried to look at the essence of man and the essence of human life from the point of view that arises when human life in its completeness is placed before the soul. I said that this human life does not only flow during the waking hours, but that about one third of the entire human life flows during sleep. And initially, if we consider only the ordinary human consciousness, we stand before this human life in such a way that when we look back into our earthly existence in terms of memory, we actually only ever remember the days, those times of our life that we spend awake. We always overlook, so to speak, that which takes place in the time that we have slept through. Now, however, it must be said: For what we have to create outwardly for earth culture, earth life, our waking day life comes into consideration; but it is a question of whether only those ideas come into consideration that take place in the waking day life before the ordinary consciousness.

That this is not the case can already be taught by a superficial consideration. Only those considerations which I want to make today and in the last days of this week will show that the events which the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up remain hidden, but that these events are still incomparably more important for the inner being of the human being on earth than the events which take place during the day.

Today, in continuation of what was said yesterday, we first want to consider some things which again result from a comparison of the sleeping life and the ordinary waking life. The life of sleep takes place partly in complete dreamless sleep. The time we spend with our earthly life during this dreamless sleep, if it contains events for our life, is completely unconscious. From this unconsciousness, from this complete darkness of consciousness, dreams then emerge, and from dreams we either wake up to ordinary consciousness, in that earthly reality is given to us through sensory perception and through the combination of the intellect, or we also sleep from this reality through the dream into dreamless consciousness.

Let us once again make it clear to ordinary external observation what the difference is between dreaming and external sensory observation, which lives in images and concepts of the mind.

We can say that for many people dreams often contain a more vivid reality than that which takes place in waking daily life. But this is a pictorial reality that we do not follow with our will, but inevitably with our soul. And we can precisely indicate the difference between following these dream images and following the ordinary reality images of waking daily life. We do not want to get involved in particular philosophical speculations. These could also be made, but we will refrain from them now. We only want to look at what the very popular consciousness gives us. We can say that the dream images are such that we live in them. We live in the images themselves. We live with the images. In waking daytime life we naturally have color images, sound images and so on before us in the same way as in dreaming experience. But we are compelled to relate these images, be they facial images, sound images, thermal images, tactile images and so on, to a certain extent to hard reality. We see everywhere in day-to-day reality the need to come up against what the image shows us with our will, so to speak.

This is not the case with, well, let's say dream reality. Dream reality is, if I may put it crudely, to be penetrated everywhere. We can only find the point of view from which we judge the significance of dream reality within waking daily life. As long as we dream, we consider the dream to be reality, and if we were to dream our whole life, dream reality would be the only reality for us. We need not imagine that outer life would then be different from what it is now. We could imagine that individual human beings would not meet in life through their own will, but would be pushed towards each other as if automatically by natural forces or pushed towards each other by some higher being. We could also imagine that people are driven to their work, pushed by higher beings or by forces of nature. In short, everything that happens to us in waking life could happen. We don't need to know anything about it. If we were only dreaming, we would have a dream reality before us. It would not occur to us to want to somehow break through this reality to another reality. We wake up through the natural organization of our organism and then gain the viewpoint within sensory reality to judge the other relative reality value of the dream.

So it is only when we go through this life-jolt from dreaming to waking that we gain the point of view to judge the relative reality value of the dream.

But we must now ask ourselves: Is everything that we experience during daytime waking really a waking state? Well, yesterday I explained in detail that this is not the case. I explained in detail that actually only our imaginations, but these only in so far as they depict external reality, bring us into wakefulness. So that we are actually only awake in our imaginations. In our feelings we have no other reality before us with regard to the state of the soul than in dreams; only that the dream appears to us in images, the feelings in that indeterminacy with which they emerge from the depths of the life of the soul.

However, if one is not an ordinary psychologist who forges everything according to some preconceptions, but if one approaches the emotional content of the soul with impartial observation, one sees how the feelings, which, if I may put it this way, shoot up against the life of imagination, show a blurring, a fluctuating merging like the dream images. We also dream with feeling when we are awake. Only because, I would like to say, the substance in which the dream images appear is different from the substance of the feelings, we do not come to the conclusion that actually all feeling has only the meaning of reality that the dream also has. So that, while we are really imagining while awake, our imaginations are continually flooded with the indeterminate subjective contents of feeling.

Imagine vividly how, on waking, the dream images play into the waking consciousness of the day, how in the dream images everything is fluctuatingly enlarged, diminished - as the case may be - so you will be able to say to yourself: Something comes, seemingly naturally, to the human being in images, which otherwise comes to the human being in the emotional life, again blurred, subjectively enlarging, reducing things, from within.

And with regard to our volition, we are also in deep sleep when awake. We only know the intentions of our will. But these are thoughts, ideas. If I want to go for a walk, I first have the idea of going for this walk. This is my intention. Ordinary consciousness shows just as little of how this intention constantly enters my organism as it shows what passes from falling asleep to waking up. Again, I can only measure the success by the movement that I make, by the change in the aspects that appear before me when I take the walk - in other words, again by ideas. What actually takes place in the organism between the idea of the intention and the idea of success, I sleep through for the ordinary consciousness just as I sleep through what takes place from falling asleep to waking up.

So we can say that man is willing, even when he is awake, in a deep dreamless sleep, that he is sentiently dreaming, even when he is awake, and that he is only awake in a certain way when he lives in ideas. But if man really looks honestly within himself, he realizes that these ideas are only awake in relation to external nature, not in relation to their own life. In relation to his own life of imagination, man cannot come to a real wakefulness. One only has to be clear about the fact that for most people, if they cannot imagine anything external, imaginative activity no longer exists at all. But that is actually only because, especially in today's culture, man is devoted to the outside world, so that we can compare this devotion to being in a roaring, roaring world.

Imagine someone here playing the piano or some instrument, and out there the machines are roaring in a quite extraordinary way. You would hear the machines. You would hardly be able to hear the piano, especially if you were a little further away from it. Basically, it is the same with what actually lives inside the human being from the activity of thinking. But we have to use the comparison correctly. When we learn external natural science today, when we absorb all the concepts that are brought to man in the external theory of evolution, then it is basically a din of thought, a noise of thought. And this noise of thinking, which today's man indulges in, especially if he is a scientist, disturbs his finer perception of inner thinking activity. That is why he sleeps through the inner activity of thinking.

In my “Philosophy of Freedom” I referred to this pure thinking, which does not think something external, but which runs entirely within the human being. But I am also aware that with this pure thinking I have actually described something of which many of our contemporaries say that it does not exist; just as someone who hears the roar of machines out there and not the piano would say that it does not exist.

But if this is so, we can see something extraordinarily important from it, namely that we are actually only awake for thinking, insofar as it has an external natural content, but that we are at most dreaming with regard to the inner activity that we accomplish there. Moreover, we dream the feelings and sleep through the will. Thus the activity of the soul, that which lives within us, is basically not awakened when we are awake to the sense world. We continue to sleep, even during daytime waking, for our thinking activity, for feeling, for willing. We only wake up for external nature. And this waking up is something we are still developing through instruments, through experimental methods, and thereby arrive at the meaningful natural science of the present. This must come into being by reflecting the external processes in our ideas, so to speak. But we do not wake up to the same extent for our thinking, feeling and willing. And whoever can observe impartially how the dream actually differs from the outer physical-sensual world of perception, will not find the life of the soul according to thinking, feeling and willing similar to that which outer sensual perceptual impressions are, but will at most find this life of the soul similar to its most significant element, dreaming. With regard to the content of our soul, we are actually dreaming and sleeping all the time. We only wake up to the content of nature. We do not wake up at all to the content of our soul in ordinary consciousness, we sleep gently away. And as we said, the dream images are, so to speak, such that one can penetrate them, that they do not rest on a hard external reality that is subject to the will. But our soul content is also like that. It lives in images. And anyone who has the ability to compare qualities, not just quantities, will find that if he attributes pictorial character to the dream content, which initially does not point to a reality, he must also attribute pictorial character to the content of his own soul.

But then a meaningful question arises from this. If I live in dreams, I wake up to physical reality, then feel connected to physical reality as a reality by the fact that I am switched on with my will in my body, and from the point of view of this physical reality I attribute to the dream at most a relative, a completely different reality.

Can I now - so the question is - wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? Can I switch myself on, just as I switch the dream images into what is the structure of reality through my will, which I press into my body, can I also switch thinking, feeling and willing into a corresponding reality through a higher awakening? This, you see, is the question: Can I wake up to the life of the soul in the same way as I wake up to nature? The content of nature, which I experience as a human being during my earthly existence with the outer physical-sensual reality, appears to me pictorially in my dreams. But the whole life of the soul also only appears to me pictorially as in a dream. So, can I wake up to the life of the soul?

Yes, you can wake up. One can awaken by first sharpening and internalizing one's thinking through such exercises as I have given in the book “How to Gain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Secret Science”, by not merely allowing oneself to be stimulated to a thought content from outside, but by giving oneself a manageable thought content, which is not suggested to one, from within, then resting on this thought content, concentrating on such a thought content actively given to the soul from within. In this way, one gradually arrives at the real consciousness of thinking.

You do not have the consciousness of thinking at all if you only allow yourself to be stimulated for the ideas from the outside. Only if one stimulates oneself to think from within again and again through meditation, through concentration on the content of thought, then one becomes aware of oneself within thinking. Then you realize that you actually live in this thinking, but that you only don't know it when you allow yourself to be stimulated from the outside. Thinking becomes alive in this way, whereas otherwise it is abstract and dead. Thinking becomes something that does not merely exist in the shadows of thought that we receive from outside, but something that stirs inwardly like the blood of the soul. One becomes as if filled with a second humanity.

The thoughts become living forces, image forces, as I have also called them in my book “Theosophy”. And one becomes aware that one actually carries thinking within oneself as a second body, as the etheric body, as the body of formative forces; for one becomes aware that that which otherwise exists only shadowed in thoughts is actually the same forces that bring about our growth. One withdraws into the growth of one's human being, and one comes to realize how that which would otherwise proceed merely chemically as processes according to the peculiarities of the substances we absorb is processed through the same inner spiritual corporeality, etheric corporeality, which forms our thoughts, how we become a unified inner human being through these inwardly living, stimulating thoughts. In this way, we get to know a second person within ourselves.

But you also come to something else. This second person, whom we get to know, is not merely a cloud that fills the physical body in a vague way. This second person is actually in constant motion, and it is not possible to hold him in one moment. You see, it is actually like this: if we have the physical body of the human being in a certain point of life, then we can draw what we experience in this way, and what is identical with our thinking - only that in ordinary thinking we have the shadows of thoughts, not the living thoughts themselves - for a moment there (see drawing). What pervades the human being as such a second etheric or visual force body can only be captured for a moment. In the previous moment it was quite different; in the next moment it will be different again, and so on backwards and forwards.

But this leads to the conclusion, if one comes to it in the inner, contemplative experience, that this body of formative forces, which for the ordinary consciousness expresses itself as the shadowy abstract thoughts, is nothing spatial at all, that it is something that runs in time. This leads us back as a living tableau to a certain moment of our first childhood. I will now draw this schematically. \

Imagine that we are already an older person in this time; but this pictorial body of forces is not limited to one time, but leads back to our childhood. We do not view our life in terms of memories, but like a tableau all at once. What I am drawing here spatially is temporal. This now leads back to our childhood, to the time in our childhood up to which we usually remember.

There is now also this etheric body, this body of imagery. But if, through careful practice, you acquire the ability to look back to that point, then you reach the point where you learned to think as a small child. It is as if one reaches a limit with thinking, at first with ordinary thinking. For ordinary consciousness, for ordinary memory, you reach this limit. In the imagination you come further back to the other side. One looks into the soul content of the child that one had when one was not yet able to think, when one dreamed oneself into the world as a child. For it was only at a certain moment that thinking occurred, namely after speaking.

Now you can see into time, see what it was like in the soul before you had the shadowy abstract thoughts. Then we still had living thinking. And living thinking had a powerful plasticizing effect on the human brain, on the entire human organization. Later, when much of this thinking is taken into the abstract, into the dead, there are only remnants left to work on the human physical organization. While one is dreaming as a child, not yet able to think, thinking is active. Precisely because in later life one cannot look at such thinking through the noise of the world, it does not happen at all that one looks back into the thinking that was still active. Now one can look back. And then this thinking appears as the sum of the forces that actually built you up as a human being, as forces of growth, as forces of nourishment and so on. One notices how the human organization is built out of the ether of the world, for these forces lie within it. You get closer and closer to the etheric body. One knows how this etheric body is most active from the outside into the child in the very first years, when the child cannot yet think, when it still spends its life dreaming. This is how one advances to the imagination.

But something can remain. You don't realize it if you don't do the exercises I've mentioned in the books I've mentioned in the face of today's culture, which is roaring with scientificity. But then you realize that something has remained of this thinking from the other side, as you had it as a small child. This thinking, which is constructive, formative for the organism, to which one owes one's outer physical organism in the first place, this lively thinking I have called imaginative thinking in my books. But something of this imaginative thinking remains with you, and through practice you can also explore it again in later life, so that you can approach the etheric body.

I already drew attention to this yesterday, but since not everyone was there, I would like to point it out again: Take the human eye, the optic nerve of the human eye, which goes inwards, spreads out in the eye. If you go so far with the visual force body (purple-red), which essentially follows the outer physical nerve processes (yellow), that you come close to those processes (red) where the outer world is reflected through the eye, then you have perception of the outer world. And what then establishes itself in the nerve - I will now only describe this approximately, it would take too much time if I were to describe the exact process - that which establishes itself through the nerve in the body of visual forces can then always be stimulated to activity again. With the activity of the body of visual forces, the nervous system, one reaches the point where the nerves end (yellow). One does not, so to speak, penetrate the nerve as far as the processes that reflect the outer world, one only gives an impulse to that which lives in them in the formative forces body, pushes this formative forces body to where the nerve stumps end, then one receives the memory impression. The memory impression consists essentially in the fact that one reaches the nerve endings with the inner activity; while for the sensory impressions one pushes through the nerve endings and advances to the processes in the senses that are mainly caused by the blood.

There you see the living activity of the body of formative forces. But everything that you push into memory must have entered the nervous system, so it has only been there since we learned to think as a very small child. What was there before is now so - and if one has now trained the mind through exercises and looks back, one sees this in retrospect through the temporally passing second human being -: There one becomes aware of how, on the same paths on which otherwise the impressions entering from outside turn around again through the memory in the memory faculty, how that which is now also the activity of the body of formative forces comes in from behind, so to speak. We actually have these two activities all the time. But in ordinary consciousness man knows only of the one, of memory. But one has these two activities: That which stems from the external sensory perceptions, which are pushed back and can in turn be pushed forward to the nerve stumps, so that the memory images emerge; but there is also something that pours into the whole nervous system from that side, so to speak, in a human-creative way, where one does not perceive sensually with the same strength as on the front of the body.

The creative forces enter the human being from behind - of course, this is not entirely accurate - but from behind: In early childhood, when one is not yet able to think, quite powerful, later weaker. This is the thinking that is not taken from the sensory world, that is taken from the entire universe, that is taken from the world ether, that we acquire by descending from pre-earthly existence into earthly existence, that we still retain superhumanly until the moment when we learn to think. At the moment when we learn to think, we close the door, so to speak, to this active thinking, to this development of the human formative forces in the formative body, in the etheric body, according to the continuous stream of our life. Learning to think for the outer sense world means closing the gate for the universal world-forming powers of thought.

When we were children, we closed the gate for the world-forming powers of thought. But they remain in us, because we need these formative forces continuously in the first period of our lives, as long as we are growing as growth forces, and later as the processing forces for what we absorb as nourishment and so on. But we do not notice them. We only notice that which is reflected by the formative forces in the body from the impressions we have absorbed, which then reach the nerve endings in the memories.

But through exercises in concentration and meditation we can become aware of that which now forms us from the world etheric. In our self-perception we become aware of processes which also take place in time, which we have not absorbed through external impressions, but which only have a flow to one side. If we then follow these up to the point where the nerves run out, where we otherwise have the memories of external impressions, then we not only get the image of our etheric body, but the image of how we as human beings are contained within the entire world ether. We become aware of ourselves as a second human being. We learn to recognize how the etheric forces move in and out, and how everything that is everywhere outside as a universal play of world forces and moves into us is the same as the weaving of thoughts within us in the shadow image. We become aware of how the thoughts within us are the shadow image of the etheric body, how the etheric body is actually a living thing, how it is a link in the whole world ether. We have reached the first stage of supersensible knowledge.

You could say: What comes to light in thinking is actually formed as if through a mirror (see drawing). There is the coating of the mirror. Thus the mirror is directed forwards, towards the senses (red arrow). That which is taken in through the senses is reflected back and comes to consciousness when it reaches the nerve stumps. But there is also an inner activity which does not proceed in this way, but which passes through the mirror (purple arrows). If we follow this, then we have a body of image forces that is part of the image forces of the whole universe. In this way, however, we have come to the other side, so to speak, for thinking.

What is this practicing that leads to imaginative thinking? It consists in the fact that, whereas otherwise one always sees only as far as the mirror of one's inner being, to that which is reflected from within, but which is nothing other than outer nature, one now acquires the ability to see behind the mirror. There is not the same as in outer nature; there are the human-creative powers. This is the other side of thinking. Here is dead thinking, also called abstract thinking. There is living thinking. And in living thinking, thoughts are forces.

This is precisely the secret of thinking, that what one actually has within oneself in ordinary thinking is only the shadow image of what true thinking is. But true thinking pervades the world, is in the world as a power structure, not just in man.

It is not very clever at all for man to believe that thinking is only in him. It's a bit like drawing water from a stream and drinking it and then thinking: Yes, my tongue, it has continually brought forth the water. We draw water from the entire water supply of the earth. Of course, we are not under the illusion that our tongue produces the water. Only when we think do we do that. There we speak of the brain producing thought, while we merely draw from the total thought that is universally spread out in the world, which we then have within us as a sum of thoughts.

Man indulges in yet another illusion when he thinks of his imagination, an illusion that I can compare with the following. Imagine a path like the one down to Arlesheim and Dornach, such a soft path! I am now walking over it. You will see the tracks of my feet (see drawing, red). Now someone comes from Mars, has never seen anything like it on Earth, sees the tracks. He doesn't know any humans, because he comes from Mars, and it's at a time of day when no one has ever walked before. He sees the tracks. Aha, he thinks, there's the earth, there are the tracks; down there is earth, that's substance - he already knows that from Mars - down there in the earth's substance are all kinds of forces, vibrating forces, or whatever, ions or electrons, whatever it may be. These forces, they play below, and they cause the traces here, and that is why you can see the traces.

But the good inhabitant of Mars is mistaken, he does not notice that I have gone over there and that the earth has done nothing at all, that this earth down to Arlesheim is most innocent of these traces. There are no forces down there that have caused it to be configured, it came from outside.

Man also indulges in these illusions with regard to the brain. Such structures are also there, and he thinks that these structures are caused from within, and that this then appears in the thoughts. But they are traces made from the outside. We really do find a complete imprint of thought in the brain. There is nothing better to do than to follow how a person's thinking is represented down to the smallest detail in the forms of the brain. But just as little as the footprints in the earth have arisen from below, just as little have these formations of the brain arisen from anything other than impressions which the living thinking, which comes from the world ether, which lives and lives in the world ether, has dug into it.

What I am telling you now becomes a living view when one penetrates to this imaginative thinking. And just as you can grasp thinking from the other side, so to speak, you can now grasp another element that you experience somewhat earlier in normal human life, speech, also from behind, so to speak, from the other side.

Imagine that you let the air flow inwards through your lungs, through the larynx and through the other organs of speech. Through the formation of the larynx, the tongue, the palate and so on, the sounds are formed on the outside. If you follow this whole process from a certain point in the organism, you will have outward speech. But imagine that you are not tracing speech outwards from the speech organs, but you are tracing the process backwards (see drawing, red) to speech. Again, you cannot do this with ordinary consciousness, you must achieve this through exercises, that you follow the inner up to the point where the speech of earthly life forms outwards, that you follow the inner up to this point where speech first forms. This is not found in the physical and not in the etheric body, this is now found in an even higher part of the human organism than the etheric body or the body of formative forces, this is found in what I have called the astral body in my books.

What is spoken outwardly is language for earthly life. That which approaches the human being from behind, as it were, that which reaches the organs of speech, that which does not sound outwards as speech, but that which speaks inwards, that which does not emerge from the larynx outwards as earthly audible speech, but that which comes from behind, stops at the larynx, becomes mute there, instead of speech beginning there, which goes out earthly: that is spiritual speech. This is what we can call the spiritual language that is spoken to us from the spiritual world.

The impression that one receives through it, that is the inspiration, now meant in a quite rational sense. This inspiration must be brought about by withdrawing the consciousness, again through the exercises which I have described in the books I have mentioned, from being devoted to the outer words. Again, that which reaches the larynx or the organs of speech was particularly strong, and that which speaks to us from the world, whereas otherwise we speak to the world through our organs of speech - this inspiring was particularly strong in childhood, until we learned to speak. When we learned external language, these forces ceased to work in this way. They are now only present within us, and we attain them when we rise to the gift of inspiration.

Then we become aware of a third element within us, a third person who now does not belong to space and time, but who is strong and formative within us. This is the astral body. It is the astral body in which the processes are inspirations, where we experience what is actually behind our emotional life. The emotional life is the dreaming of that which flows into us in an inspiring way. And this emotional life is intimately connected with the breathing and speaking process.

Therefore, in older times, when people wanted to ascend into the spiritual world in a different way, this breathing process, the inner breathing process, was influenced by exercises. And the old yoga exercises were calculated to direct attention to that which lies behind speech. By putting artificial breathing in the place of natural breathing, one became aware of it, just as one becomes aware of something everywhere when one deviates from the ordinary.

Just think that you perceive the water in a river around you in different ways when you swim with the speed of flowing water, or when you swim slower or faster. If you swim at the speed of flowing water, you do not perceive a certain counter-pressure. If you swim more slowly, you will perceive it. Because the Indian yogi shapes his breathing in a different way than it naturally proceeds, he perceives that which is in the breathing stream as spiritual, that spiritual through which we have our astral body, and through which we in turn project into a higher world than the etheric world.

For us these exercises are the right ones - because humanity is progressing - which I have described in “How do you gain knowledge of the higher worlds?”. But you see, everywhere one can point to the concrete processes that underlie what the outside world finds so fantastic when anthroposophy speaks of man not consisting of the physical body alone, but of the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. We will talk about this next time. But these things have not been pulled out of our fingers, these things have not been speculated, but have come about through careful research, which takes the scientific method further right up to the human being, to the whole being of the human being - albeit research that is dependent on the human cognitive faculties being increased more and more.

So what does the imagination consist of, through which one penetrates into the etheric world and into the actual etheric life? This imagination consists in the fact that one not only pursues into the senses the processes that are first pushed backwards through the senses and can then be pushed forward again to the nerve endings, but that one becomes aware of that which is from the universe, from the cosmos, of the same kind as the sensory perceptions, but now belongs to the supersensible world, that one becomes aware of it as otherwise only the memories do.

If one becomes aware of the world-creating forces, as one otherwise perceives the memories, then one has imaginative being, then one experiences the etheric being of the world. If one becomes aware behind the language of that which now does not go out from the larynx to the front, but speaks in from the other side from the universe, from the cosmos, but falls silent at the larynx, then one becomes aware through inspiration of a further world to which we belong with our third human organism, with the astral body.

However, one thing becomes apparent. Here in the physical-sensory world we have on the one hand the physical processes and on the other the moral impulses that rise from within us. They stand side by side in such a way that even today theology would like the sensory world to be understood only sensually, and for the moral world there would be a completely different kind of knowledge. The moment we advance to inspiration, when we live not only in the world in which we speak from the larynx forward, but when we live in the world which speaks through our whole human being, but falls silent at the larynx, because we push the gate forward when we learn the outer language, so that we experience the outer language as a substitute for the heavenly language - the moment we live into this world, when we live into this world, which now ends at the larynx, then we experience the inspirational content of the world, then we experience the secrets of the world, and then we do not merely experience a nature which moral impulses cannot approach, but we experience a world behind the natural existence where natural impulses, natural laws and moral laws are interwoven, where they are one. We have lifted the veil and found a world in which the moral and the physical resonate with each other. And we shall see that this is the world in which we were in the pre-earthly existence before we descended to earth, into which we enter again after we have passed through the gate of death.