Anthroposophy and Knowledge of the Spirit

The other is, I would say, the polar opposite. We experience it again more or less unconsciously — unconsciously in most people — when we pass from the sleeping state to the waking state, at most with the transition through more or less chaotic dreams, but we know from healthy reason that they have only an illusory value compared to what we call in ordinary life the reality of existence. With this transition through the dream life, we take possession of our physical body with our spiritual self. When we wake up, we grasp our senses, how the outside world is reflected in our senses in its colors, sounds, and so on, and we experience this inwardly. We inwardly experience how we grasp our willpower and thereby become active human beings. However, as I already hinted at in the last lecture from a different point of view, what darkness are we actually looking down into when we have only a simple willpower, when we decide to raise our arm and move our hand? We have this thought, and then we see how this thought is carried out in the movement of the hand, in the raised arm. But how the thought flows down into the organism, what complicated processes are involved before the hand is moved, all this disappears from our consciousness. When we wake up, we take hold of our body with our spirit, but what this spirit experiences down there is shrouded in complete darkness even during the waking state, so that in this waking state, too, we have only an indeterminate relationship to our spirituality and its relation to the outer world – to the outer world that we ourselves are through our body – which presents us with a mystery. On the one hand, we feel the powerlessness of the spirit; on the other hand, we feel it sinking into our own inner darkness when we wake up. From such experiences, man forms the riddle questions about the nature of spirituality, and then two opponents of the soul life stand before this spiritual world, to which man strives with his knowledge, with his will, two enemies, one of whom clouds this spiritual world for him, the other threatens to take it from him. One enemy strikes precisely those who, even in our present existence, still live more or less naively in the face of our scientific worldviews, accepting many traditional ideas into their worldview without examination, often as the worst illusions about the supersensible, about the spiritual, because they feel that they cannot truly live in mental health without such ideas about the spiritual. Then they give themselves over to that which comes from the one enemy of the soul life: superstition. All kinds of soul-forms stream out of the human life of will and place themselves before the human spirit, wanting to tell it what underlies the external world as spiritual reality. Those who have not become acquainted with the scientific conscientiousness and methodology of the present time very easily succumb to such ideas, but they also experience a sad consequence of superstition in the human soul. If we understand the world in such a way that we accept what flows into our consciousness through our will as decisive for the supersensible, then we go to recognize the outer world. We find obstacles at every turn when trying to orient ourselves in the external world. We believe that this or that must apply in the sense world because we accept it through our superstition. External nature does not confirm what we assume in our superstitious experience at every turn. This leads us to a certain reorientation towards this external world. The world appears to us differently than we imagine it. We become unsure of ourselves, and because we become unsure of ourselves, we lose the ability to develop strong impulses for our actions. We become unfit for our own actions, we become unfit for interaction with other people.