What is the Purpose of Anthroposophy and the Goetheanum?

GA 84 — 26 May 1924, Paris

How to Know Things About the Supernatural World

Anyone today who strives from within to gain knowledge of the supersensible world is usually referred to the methods and results that come from ancient times. If one then takes a closer look at what is referred to, one encounters the so-called mysteries in the development of mankind. These were places where, on the one hand, religious and cultic life was cultivated - the spiritual flowed through the religious and cultic - and, on the other hand, what we call scientific knowledge was cultivated. The spiritual flowed into this other form of human perception. And a third aspect was the artistic, which was expressed in the mysteries. On the one hand, what flowed through religion, cult and science revealed itself to the senses, to the directly perceptible view of life. And on the other hand, what flowed through art revealed itself. Basically, humanity, which strives for the supersensible, still lives today from what tradition has preserved from ancient times.

In today's lecture, I do not want to speak of these old traditions, nor of the old mysteries; but I would like to speak of the possibility of a new mystery life, of the possibility of a new path to the supersensible worlds, which in its meaning and conception can be greater than what is demanded today as scientific knowledge by the enormous progress of scientific thinking in modern times.

When we look into our own inner being, we find the following activities within it: thinking, feeling and willing. Of these soul activities, only our thinking is independent of our physicality, as long as this thinking is healthy. The person who is able to completely surrender to the character of thinking with their soul knows that there can only be independent, logical laws because healthy thinking in the natural human being is independent of the physical. It is only when a person begins to think pathologically, when something morbid enters his thinking, that he becomes dependent on the physical. But what does that mean? It means nothing other than this: as long as thinking is healthy, it remains outside the physical; it only submerges into the body, only enters the unconscious when it becomes ill.

This is not the case with our feelings, nor with our will. In its completely normal state, our feeling submerges into physicality and is hardly conscious to us as something dream-like. It dwells entirely in physicality. It is the same with our will. In our ordinary lives, we are not aware of the actual process of willing because it is deeply submerged in physicality.

If we now want to attain a higher knowledge, then we must develop abilities as human beings that are just as independent as our ordinary thinking is from this physicality, but which are capable of perceiving higher worlds than this ordinary thinking, which in the present state of humanity is only capable of perceiving and dissecting the physical-sensual environment.

In the ancient mysteries, this release of spiritual abilities from the physical organization was brought about by external processes. Let us realize, for example, what effect a sound, a tone, that moves quickly, has on our soul, a sound that startles us. This rapid impression does not allow us to immerse what is happening emotionally in our soul in the physical. And if we experience shock, fear and dread in quick succession, we are able to hold the soul qualities outside the physical. The very methodical events of the ancient mysteries consisted of freeing the soul from the physical in this way. Frightening, dramatic processes that lead the soul life to a peak and then let it fall were designed to let people experience the soul life as something that remains outside the physical, not submerged in the physical. When a person came to after such processes, it was clear to him: during such experiences he had gained insight into a world into which he would not otherwise have seen. And he called this world the “supersensible”. Such external practices, which for the most part have taken on a cultic form in the old mysteries, are no longer suitable for modern humanity. They also presuppose that those who have been led to higher knowledge isolate themselves. The mysteries were strictly segregated sites, strictly governed by priestly sages who could arrange the external performance in such a way that a person really did develop the habit of keeping their soul independent of the body and, with this independent soul, of entering the spiritual world, by undergoing the process over a period of years.

Modern man would have no trust in people who have to seek the way into the spiritual world in this way. For these methods require strict separation of the spiritual seeker from the world, and in ancient times it was the case that one only had trust in the spiritual man when he separated himself from the rest of humanity. Today, one can only have trust in the man of knowledge if he is fully involved in life, if nothing is alien to him from the full, direct human life. Therefore, the present time and the near future will require methods for the path to the spiritual world that are more inwardly soul-based, so that in pursuing these methods, man is independent of external activities and influences. I would like to speak to you about methods for the path to the spiritual world that work quietly within the soul, but which lead just as surely to knowledge of the spiritual world, that is, to initiation, as the older methods of the mysteries led to this initiation.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” which has been translated into French as “Initiation,” I discuss the modern methods of initiation. This evening, I would like to speak in principle about what these modern methods of initiation are.

The beginning of the path to knowledge of spiritual worlds must be made through a special inner soul treatment of our world of thoughts, our powers of thought. In our ordinary life we devote ourselves to the outer world or to the thoughts that arise from our inner being. And however much we develop relative activity in this ordinary consciousness, in our thinking as a whole we are still passive, devoted to the sensual or the inner soul world. Indeed, modern man even places great value on remaining in this passivity of thought because he is afraid that in the moment when he forms his thoughts out of himself, he will enter the unreal, the realm of fantasy. This whole attitude towards thinking must change if man wants to enter the supersensible world. He must activate his thinking. I have named this activation of thinking 'meditation' after an old custom. It consists of our not giving ourselves over to our thinking, to anything objective, but rather, out of the inner strength of our soul life, we place a clear thought content of the simplest possible kind at the center of our consciousness and, for a certain period of time, with the exclusion of any other attention, we focus all the soul's attention on this one soul content.

When we rest actively with our whole soul on a soul content, something occurs with the soul forces that otherwise occurs with the physical forces when, for example, we use a muscle repeatedly in the course of our work. The muscle grows stronger. In the same way, the soul forces are strengthened and invigorated inwardly when the soul's activity is repeatedly directed towards one content. This content must be clear and transparent, because it must not contain anything that can come from the unconscious. We must rest entirely on this soul content with all the deliberation of which we are capable. If we take something complicated, something that may have been brought up from memory as reminiscences, something that is linked intellectually or emotionally to these old soul contents, that must not be. We therefore do best if we allow such soul content to approach us either by, let us say, taking a completely unknown book that we have certainly never read before, we open it somewhere, we read a sentence that otherwise does not interest us at all, the content of which otherwise has no interest for us. We place this sentence at the center of our consciousness and rest on it. We concentrate all our soul life on such content for a long time. It is even better if we can gain the confidence to go to someone who really has knowledge in these matters and have them give us a soul content of the characterized kind. Then, if he is already a spiritual researcher, he will have practice in simply telling us, from the mere sight of us, what kind of spiritual content is best for our meditation. If we take such a content, which is fully present in our consciousness and easy to grasp, concentrate on it, and remain in that concentration in a completely meditative way, our thinking will gradually be completely transformed. All abstractness in our thinking disappears, all coldness disappears. Thinking becomes entirely pictorial; we gain the ability to think in saturated images that become ever more saturated and colorful. Images that gradually resemble living dream images, but have a completely different soul character, enter our consciousness. We experience something that we have never experienced before in this consciousness. We experience the possibility of thinking as calmly as only the most calm logician or mathematician can think, but not in the abstract, not thinking natural laws, but thinking in images that we do not initially know where they come from.

This first step in the recognition of the supersensible may be called imaginative knowledge. We must develop these faculties if we want to enter the first sphere of the supersensible world. If such exercises are continued long enough — for some people, depending on their individuality, they take years, for some months — then the person finally comes to develop, in a sense complete, an ability to think in images, in the same way that one can think abstractly in ordinary consciousness; not dreaming in images, but being able to think in them. But then, when one has progressed far enough with such pictorial thinking, then one knows through direct awareness: this pictorial thinking does not descend into physicality, it is free and independent of physicality. One now feels oneself in this independent pictorial thinking, one lives entirely in it, one now lives in this independent pictorial thinking as one otherwise lives in one's physical body. Just as one feels in one's physical body with one's general bodily feelings, with all that one feels flowing from this body into the soul, perhaps in the form of pain or general well-being, in short, just as one feels in one's physical body, one now feels in a finer, in a second human being. One has detached this second person from this physical body and one can then say from inner experience, from direct life: I experience myself as a human being not only in the physical body, I experience myself as a human being in an etheric body, in a body of finer substantiality. One now knows from experience that a second person is contained in the first. Just as one can perceive through the physical tools of the physical body in the physical world, through the eye the colors, through the ears the sounds, so one can now - when one feels in the etheric body and knows oneself as a second person through this etheric body, which is organized in the same way as the physical body - perceive a new world that remains impenetrable to the physical body.

The first new world that one perceives is the world of one's own last life on earth. In a mighty tableau, majestically standing, everything that was in succession in time – simultaneously as in a panorama – our life on earth stands before us from the present moment in which we live, looking back to our birth. Just as things usually stand next to each other in space, so in this retrospective, the experiences we went through in the eighth year of life, for example, stand simultaneously with those we went through in the twentieth and fiftieth year of life. Time becomes like space. And what we experience there in vivid images in a majestic panorama of life, we learn to distinguish well from ordinary memory. The ordinary memory, which we bring forth in individual thoughts, ideas, images from our human nature, is weak and pale. What we see in this overview is full of content, powerfully colored, if I may use the expression. But everything also appears to us as external things appear to us. We now know, in the overview of a moment that is, however, expanding somewhat, how our life appears to a soul's gaze. And there it shows us that in every moment of our earthly existence since our birth, or rather since our conception, a spiritual-soul element has been surging and weaving within us. This spiritual-soul substance condenses into the power of growth, the power of nutrition, into all that surges and weaves in our physical body, but ultimately it is a spiritual substance that we see when we ascend to the first step of supersensible knowledge. But at the same time we learn to recognize, besides our own etheric body, the etheric world that is around us and to which our etheric body belongs; we learn to recognize how differently we relate to this etheric world - which is there like the physical world - than to the physical world. In the physical world, the thing is there, I am there. I speak of physical things as something that is strictly separate from me; I point to it. With the etheric world, I am connected through my etheric body in the same way that a limb of my organism is connected to the whole organism. And just as a limb, my finger, separates itself from my organism, so the etheric body separates itself from the etheric universe, but it is still a limb in it. We are much more one with the world that stands behind the physical world than the physical body is one with the physical world. That is the first step in the supersensible world, and that is also the first supersensible world that we reach on the way to supersensible knowledge. The level of supersensible knowledge that I have described so far does not go further than an insight into this essence of human nature, which from birth to death develops and changes as a unity, but remains permanent remain throughout our entire life on earth, while the individual substances that we absorb are absorbed by us and then expelled by us, so that we, as physical human beings, are constantly renewing ourselves, even during our life on earth. That which is the etheric body remains as a unity from birth to death.

But if we want to go beyond this first supersensible realm, then a second level of knowledge must be developed within the soul. This can be done by activating our thinking, which we had to do in order to grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, so that we can grasp and take hold of ourselves in our etheric body, and then, for the second level of knowledge, we must again remove from our consciousness everything we gain in this way through activated thinking. Once we have firmly brought a content into our soul by concentrating with all our might, we must now leave it out again. You know what state a person enters when they have to remove the usual content of their soul, the world that the senses give them: they fall asleep. Gradually, they sink into a paralysis of the soul. This must not happen and does not happen. It is difficult to remove from the soul the content that we have brought into consciousness with all our strength. It is harder to remove this content than the content of ordinary consciousness. But if we succeed in removing it, something has occurred that is otherwise never there. A complete emptiness of consciousness has occurred in the human soul life. Through what the human being has gone through in the powerful experience of his own etheric body, he becomes able to abstract, to detach himself from all the sense world and from all ordinary thinking. He lives in a higher region. If he now removes this higher region, his own life tableau, then his consciousness becomes empty and we are in that state that is significant for all higher knowledge: we are in the state of mere waking, without this waking having any soul content. We direct an intensified, strengthened consciousness out into the emptiness of the world. We do not fall asleep while performing this task, but we remain awake, but for a moment we are only confronted with nothingness. This does not last long. When we have maintained mere waking in our consciousness, real empty consciousness, then a spiritual world penetrates into us that is not our etheric body, not that which is related to it, but which is now a spiritual world that is initially very distant. The real spiritual world penetrates into mere waking and empty consciousness, but this empty consciousness and waking must be acquired through long soul exercises, which I could only describe in principle. For this suppression of all content does not succeed at the first attempt. It must be practiced again and again. Again, for some it takes years, for some, if they are predisposed to it, depending on their destiny, it takes months to achieve that they can keep their consciousness empty without lulling it to sleep, so that the spiritual world can penetrate them.

Of course, one could say that when a person enters the spiritual world, it could be mere suggestion, an autosuggestion. How can one distinguish between suggestion and what the spiritual researcher, the initiate, calls the real spiritual world? One can only distinguish between them through life. Just as one distinguishes in life between a hot potato that has been imagined and a real hot potato, because one does not get burnt by an imaginary hot potato, but one does get burnt by a real hot potato, so one experiences real facts in the spiritual world that flows into the empty consciousness. One simply knows, just as one can distinguish a real live issue from an imagined one, through life, whereby this spiritual reality is distinguished from mere autosuggestion.

In the book mentioned earlier, I referred to this second stage of supersensible knowledge as inspired knowledge, according to an old usage that need not be objected to – we need a terminology. When one arrives at inspired knowledge, one experiences oneself, as it were, still in a third man. First there is the physical human being, then the etheric human being, and now one experiences oneself in a third human being. But by experiencing oneself in this third human being, one knows oneself not only through the strengthened, imaginative thinking independently of one's physical body, but completely outside of one's physical body. One has attained the state that can be called: life in the spirit outside of the physical body. Then the human being is also able to leave the etheric body, that is, as he has erased all imaginative content from his consciousness, he can completely erase this life tableau, to which he first came, and dive into the unconscious and live outside of his physical and etheric existence. But then, when a person achieves this, the retrospective view extends further into the past than just to the birth or conception: we look into a spiritual world in which we were as spiritual beings before we descended into the physical world. We see ourselves acting and living in this spiritual world, just as we see ourselves as physical human beings in the physical world. We learn to recognize that what nature develops as our physical human germ must unite with what descends from the spiritual worlds, for that is what we now see for ourselves. And when we have attained this knowledge, through which we go completely out of our physical and etheric bodies, then, when we go back again – that is, when the moment of our beholding the spiritual world has ceased – we look into our own physical and etheric bodies and find that our earthly life is a reflection in the soul-spiritual of what we were in the spiritual-soul before we descended to earth. And precisely by entering into our body again, into the physical and etheric body, we acquire the power of a, I would say, configured, individualized vision. Now that we are experiencing more of the general spiritual world that we passed through in our pre-earthly existence outside of our physical body and our etheric body, now that we are returning to the physical and etheric body, now we are learning, not by immersing ourselves, dive into them, but I would say to dwell in them, to live in our physical and etheric bodies, now we learn to distinguish between the spiritual beings of a higher world, with whom we were united before we descended to earthly life, and how we distinguish between individual human beings here. We learn to recognize beings that never descend to earth, that never take on a physical body, divine spiritual beings. We are fellow inhabitants of the spiritual world with them before we descend to this earth. And we learn to see, precisely because we can now be alternately outside and inside our body with the spiritual and soul, we also learn to recognize how human souls are now among these higher spiritual and soul beings, among whom we were before we descended to earth, waiting to descend to earth in order to experience it in a later time than we did.

And so, through this stage of inspired knowledge, we learn to recognize that part of the eternity of the human being that is very little considered by our sense of time, even by the religious. The present does not like to look at the pre-earthly existence. It is true that man is interested in facing up to what lies beyond death, even if only through faith or tradition, because that must come first, while man is present and therefore does not need to reflect particularly on what existed before birth. He is here, after all! But whether he will also remain here is of interest to him; in his selfishness he is interested in the second part of eternity, immortality. We do not even have a word in modern languages for the other half of eternity, for the pre-earthly existence, which is as infinite in the past as immortality is in the future. For in truth, one only comes to recognize the eternity of human life when one can again point to the words that the original languages had for eternity, and which spoke just as meaningfully of unbornness as of immortality. More recent esoteric teachings on initiation again define the eternity of the human being as consisting of the unborn and the immortal. However, the unborn is needed less for selfishness than for true knowledge. People can remain with mere belief when it comes to the immortal. Only by looking at the unborn within me, not only at the immortal, can I learn to recognize the unborn, the certainty that a spiritual essence, existing before my physical formation, is my being.

When one has emerged from one's physical and Arther body in this way and feels among spiritual beings, as one previously felt among physical beings and things in the physical body, one always knows oneself as a human being, as this particular self. And so, in a sense, one only has to start the journey back, going backwards through the sequence of times into the world that one has lived through before life on earth. But if a person, when he feels himself outside his physical and etheric bodies within a spiritual world, then looks down at the world of the stars, and the stars no longer appear to him as stars, but as worlds where higher or even lower entities dwell, then everywhere where there is a star for the physical eye, there is a world sphere of other entities. When man, as he otherwise feels in the physical body on earth, now feels in the starry world in a spiritual world, then one can speak of the astral body, as one speaks of the etheric body in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, because one is now within the spirituality of the starry world.

If man wants to progress further, then he must add to imagination and to the empty consciousness a third faculty of perception, a faculty of perception that is very often not regarded as a faculty of perception by today's consciousness. It is an ability that plays the greatest conceivable role in human life, but which is not recognized as having any right to be part of knowledge. That is the human power of love: love that brings people together in such a way that they approach the being they love through the physical body or through the embodied soul or embodied spirit. By further developing this love, so that this love can reach into the experience of the etheric body first, but that one can also bring this love over into the experience in the astral body, by further developing this ability to love, we finally not only come to but we gradually develop the ability to increase our love to such an extent that we not only see other beings, but also enter into a relationship with these other spiritual beings – we ourselves then become spirit – in the same way that we have entered into a relationship with physical people on earth. Intuition gives us the opportunity to interact with spiritual beings, just as physical abilities give people the opportunity to interact with physical people on earth. But when we have developed our ability to love to such an extent that the spiritual becomes objective to us, as the sensual is objective to us in the physical world, then we not only look back into our pre-earthly spiritual existence, but we look back into earlier earth lives, and it becomes a fact that we go through the whole human life in forms of existence between birth and death and then between death and a new birth, again from birth to death, again from death to a new birth, that we live through life in successive earthly lives and in successive purely spiritual lives. We learn to look back on our previous earthly lives and see the present, current life as a repetition of these earlier ones.

But no one can arrive at the realization of what he was like, what he was, that he even existed in a past life, who has not progressed to the point of developing love to the point that he can face himself as well as another, as another being faces him. There must be a mighty difference between the ordinary power of perception and that power of perception steeped in love, through which we see our previous lives on earth as we see the life of another person in the present. When we ascend to this level, which I have called the intuitive, the truly intuitive level, we see ourselves in our mind's eye as spiritually effective beings in repeated earthly lives. Only then are we completely outside of our physical life. But he who experiences this, he knows what death is. Death now stands before him as the external, objective realization of what he himself has experienced in knowledge. Just as he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies in knowledge, so he knows that death only discards the physical and etheric bodies, and that through the gate of death man enters into a spiritual world. Belief becomes knowledge, opinion becomes insight. We are given certain, exact, vivid science by that which we otherwise call immortality in life. We look at the immortality of our own human life, at the entry of this own human being into a post-mortal life, as we look at a prenatal spiritual life, at a pre-earthly life.

But we also look at what has developed between people in physical life during physical life on earth, at the relationships that exist in the family, where one person comes into contact with another, at the relationships that are brought about through love and friendship in human life. We look at all of this. Just as the physical body of the individual falls away at death, and the soul ascends into a spiritual world, so too, when people who have been brought together on earth by their destiny have passed through the gate of death and find themselves there among higher beings, what is physical in friendship, in love relationships on earth, falls away, and a more soulful, all the more intimate life together then occurs. Modern initiation can only show how to find the path that is otherwise a matter of mere belief, through seeing, to secure for knowledge that which is immortality, the other side of eternity.

Thus man ascends through imaginative knowledge to the view of that which lives between birth and death. Man then ascends when he acquires this knowledge to his etheric body. Inspired knowledge leads man to his astral body, and through it he enters the world he passed through before his birth, which he will enter again after death. In the astral body, one becomes acquainted with the pre-earthly and post-mortal life spheres of the human being. In the ascent to intuitive knowledge, one becomes acquainted with the fourth aspect of the human being, the true, eternal self, which passes from earth-life to earth-life and which, between individual earth-lives, has purely spiritual forms of existence.

In conclusion, now that this path of modern initiation has been sketched out in a few strokes, at least in principle, let me say this: when one looks at the ancient knowledge that was acquired in the manner described at the beginning, through external cultic and other events, this knowledge was more dream-like, instinctive. And from old instinctive, dream-like knowledge, men's convictions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, have finally emerged and remained as tradition. But today one can already sense that more people than they realize have the urge, the deep longing to rediscover the paths to the spiritual worlds. Few people are the first to admit this consciously, but in the subconscious, if one is able to see such things, one can see today how numerous people are who long for mysteries again because they want to find the way to supersensible worlds.

We were only able to make a timid beginning with what we call the Goetheanum in northwestern Switzerland, where a place of mystery was created, where man was to find a way into the supersensible in a similarly modern and prudent way as he found a way into the mysteries in ancient times in a more instinctive way. Enemies have snatched this place from us. It was destroyed by arson some time ago. These things also have their eternity. The physical fire could take from us the physical building, the Goetheanum, the physical building in which until then that spiritual science had been cultivated, of which I was allowed to give you a hint. But there is also a spiritual fire. This spiritual fire does not burn physical sites, but will always let them arise again. In the new mysteries, the students of spiritual wisdom will approach their task quietly and not as noisily as in the old mysteries. They, in turn, will bring people the knowledge of the eternal in man and the world that they so urgently need. For people need this knowledge for their thinking, for their feeling and willing, so that they may come to clarity within themselves, to a life of inner harmony, and so that they may also gain strength and security for their outer life. He needs the connection with the spiritual world. And something like the spiritual school in Dornach, on the border of Switzerland towards the northwest, will awaken more and more as a longing in human souls, born out of humanity's eternal urge for the spiritual. This urge rested for a while through centuries. These centuries have brought people the magnificent external knowledge of nature. Today, man stands and knocks again at the door that leads to the supernatural, because he cannot advance his soul with knowledge of nature. That which yearns for the spiritual world, consciously in a few people but unconsciously in a large part of humanity, can only be satisfied by the modern mysteries. Anyone who is sincere about the spiritual world will see that people will definitely crave new mysteries in the future, because spirituality will only come back to people when new mysteries arise in which people can find the spirit in a more sober and enlightened way than in the old mysteries, but in which they can be led in a more developed and perfect way through the mysteries back to the spiritual, divine world and thus to the source of humanity.