3. Natural Science and Anthroposophy

By assembling phenomena, one learns to recognize how to approach this world. One does not arrive at the realm of atoms - not at atoms, not at electrons and so on, which are justified to a certain extent, as far as external appearance is concerned. One only comes to the outer appearances in this physical-scientific way of looking at and researching. If, on the other hand, one presents these purely as phenomena, then one can penetrate to what lies behind the phenomenon - to which we ourselves belong in our eternal core - by ascending into the imaginative, inspirational, intuitive. And in this way, ladies and gentlemen, we also arrive at a certain self-knowledge, at realizing what we demand in self-observation. By developing the imaginative consciousness, we learn to look into ourselves. What is memory based on? It is based, so to speak, on the fact that we absorb what we experience in the outside world in our imagination. Not in the way it is the case, for example, in the first days of our childhood — there it is transferred down into the organization — but in such a way that it is mirrored, that it has, as it were, a mirror wall on our organization and that we absorb it by remembering, in the memory image of the experience. By developing the memory that we need for a healthy social and scientific life in this way, we overcome the bond to the physical organization through anthroposophical research. However, ordinary consciousness must always be present; it must not be as in hallucination. Rather, anyone who ascends to imaginative consciousness is always a rational human being at the same time, always has ordinary consciousness alongside. This is precisely what distinguishes imaginative envisioning, inspired envisioning, from hallucination. Hallucinations and visions live in what the body produces, so that when we develop physical images from the body, we are dealing with visions and hallucinations. When we compose images from the soul, we are dealing with imaginative creations; when we compose images from the spirit, which we grasp by learning to work freely from the body, purely in spirit and soul, we are dealing with spiritual reality. So, it is the body that produces the images by coming to hallucinations and visions. The soul composes images by coming to fantasies, not to visionary images. The spirit within us composes images by approaching spiritual realities.