Lecture II

And what wants to be expressed in the sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” is this: if a person wishes only to gaze into the spirit, to take it up more or less naively, to take it up in the same way that outer nature is taken up, then that individual would have to dam up what is active in this thinking, conceptual, sensing and feeling activity; the breakdown would have to be prevented. This means that in such a moment a person would have to diminish, to weaken, the power over the spirit, the inner consciousness, to the point of unconsciousness, to a working of the spiritual in unconsciousness. He would have to come to the point of forming something spiritual out of himself, of pressing something spiritual out of himself, as it were. To do this, however, he could not remain conscious, because the organization cannot be carried into this breakdown process, into this spiritual process.