The Development and Education of the Human Being in the Light of Anthroposophy

Such knowledge as I have just described, however, differs from the knowledge that is bound to the nervous system, which is essentially knowledge of the head. And allow me to make a personal remark, which is, however, completely factual. As a spiritual researcher trying to penetrate this realm, which I call the realms that one has to pass through before birth and after death, one is aware that you cannot get by with the thinking that otherwise serves you in life. You have to develop a strengthened thinking that engages the whole person. One does not become a medium through this, but the whole human being must be taken up by such thinking. Such thinking penetrates into feeling, into emotion, and even demands that the human being surrender himself to it with the whole content of his will. At the same time, thinking about spiritual content is such that it cannot be incorporated into the memory in the usual way, like any other. Here too I would like to make a personal comment: You see, when a spiritual researcher gives a lecture like the one I am giving here, he cannot prepare it in the same way as other scientific lectures. In that case he would only appeal to memory. But what has come about through such a deepening cannot be assimilated by memory, it must be experienced again and again in every moment. It can be brought down into those regions where we put our knowledge into words, but one must endeavor to do so with one's whole being. And that is why I have a profound experience of only being able to incorporate into human language that which I succeed in researching in the spiritual world. And by incorporating it into human language, it also becomes incorporated into memory; I only succeed when I draw or write down a few lines, so that not only the head but also all the other organ systems are involved. You have to feel the need to take one or the other to help you, because you can't manage it, it fluctuates when you want to grasp it with your head. The important thing is that I express the thought with lines and thus fix it. So you can find whole truckloads of old notebooks of mine that I never look at again. They are not there for that either, but so that what I have laboriously extracted from my mind can be developed to the point where it can be clothed in words and thus brought to the memory. Once it has been written, one has participated in the spiritual production with something else in one's organism than merely with the head, with thoughts, then one is able to hold on to that which wants to escape. The rest of the human organization is initially uninvolved, unconsciously more dormant than the mental processes, and when we incorporate something into our will, we make use of those organs that are in a state that we describe as dormant when we are awake. We are actually only awake in our thoughts and imagination, for the way in which our mental images penetrate into our organism as a volitional decision, to become a movement of the hand or fingers, remains completely shrouded in darkness in ordinary consciousness. Only the spiritual researcher will recognize what happens between the process in the brain and the movement. And so spiritual knowledge, which is not ordinary head knowledge, is entrusted to the whole human organization. By acquiring knowledge of the human being from within the whole human being, one is able to apply this knowledge of the human being, which can take the prenatal and the after-death as a tangible reality, to practical life in a completely different way than one would be able to without this true knowledge of the human being.