Lecture XVII

It is simply a fact that one can arrive at a view of the world in two ways. The one way is to lovingly devote oneself to the physical sense world and to become familiar with all its aspects; thereby one increasingly becomes familiar with the work of the gods. If one looks at nature in an inner, spiritual way and not just in an external mechanical one, one then has what one could call nature in the widest sense of the word. However, one could also imagine—and the idea is a correct one—that one can get the same world content in a purely spiritual way from within through one's own soul. So that someone with sufficient inner force will be able to see that some natural phenomenon is involved at a particular point in world events, even if he has no access to any historical reports about it. One can definitely say that it's possible to arrive inwardly at the knowledge that earthquakes or something else occurred in some year when something was going on in mankind. Many people have the more or less clear feeling that they can know concrete details about the world from within, and it is a perfectly correct one. Now one can ask what is actually involved when a man gets into the spiritual world in this Imaginative way.