IV
The Attainment of
Spiritual Knowledge
I should like to respond to
the kind invitation to lecture this evening by telling you how, by
means of direct investigation, it is possible to acquire the
spiritual knowledge which we are proposing to study here in its
application to education. I shall be dealing today with the methods
whereby super-sensible worlds may be investigated and on another
occasion it may be possible to deal with some of the actual results
of super-sensible research. But apart from this, let me add by way of
introduction that everything I propose to say will refer to the
investigation of spiritual worlds, not to the understanding of the
facts yielded by super-sensible knowledge. These facts have been
investigated and communicated, and they can be grasped by
healthy human intelligence, if this healthy intelligence will
be unprejudiced enough not to base its conclusions wholly on what
goes by the name of proof, logical deduction, and the like, in regard
to the outer sense world. On account of these hindrances it is
frequently stated that unless one is able oneself to
investigate super-sensible worlds, one cannot understand the
results of super-sensible research.
We are dealing here with
what may be called initiation-knowledge — that knowledge which
in ancient periods of human evolution was cultivated in a somewhat
different form from that which must be fostered in our present age.
Our aim, as I have already said in other lectures, is to set out
along the path of research leading to super-sensible worlds by means
of the thinking and perception proper to our own epoch — not to
revive what is old. And precisely in initiation-knowledge, everything
depends upon one being able to bring about a fundamental
reorientation of the whole human life of soul.
Those who have acquired
initiation-knowledge differ from those who have knowledge in the
modern sense of the word, and not only by reason of the fact that
initiation-knowledge is a higher stage of ordinary knowledge. It is,
of course, acquired on the basis of ordinary knowledge, and this
basis must be there. Intellectual thinking must be fully developed if
one wishes to reach initiation-knowledge. But then a fundamental
reorientation is necessary; for he who possesses initiation-knowledge
must look at the world from an entirely different point of view from
one without initiation-knowledge. I can express in a simple
formula how initiation-knowledge principally differs from ordinary
knowledge. In ordinary knowledge, we are conscious of our thinking,
and of all those inner experiences whereby we acquire
knowledge, as the subjects of this knowledge. We think, for example,
and we believe that we are understanding something through our
thoughts. When we conceive of ourselves as thinking beings, we are
the subject. We seek for objects, in that we observe nature and
human life, and in that we make experiments. We seek always for
objects. Objects must press against us. Objects must yield themselves
to us so that we may grasp them with our thoughts and apply our
thinking to them. We are the subject; that which comes to us is the
object.
An entirely different
orientation is brought about in a man who is reaching out for
initiation-knowledge. He has to realize that, as man, he is the
object, and he must seek for the subject to this human object.
Therefore the complete reverse must begin. In ordinary knowledge we
feel ourselves to be the subject and we seek the objects that are
outside us. In initiation-knowledge we ourselves are the object and
we seek for the subject — or rather in actual
initiation-knowledge the subject appears of itself. But that is then
a matter of a later stage of knowledge.
So you see, even this
rather theoretical definition indicates that in
initiation-knowledge we must really take flight from ourselves, that
we must become like the plants, the stones, the lightning and thunder
which, to us, are objects. In initiation-knowledge we slip out of
ourselves, as it were, and become the object which seeks for its
subject. If I may use a somewhat paradoxical expression — in
this particular connection in reference to thinking — in
ordinary knowledge we think about things; in initiation-knowledge we
must discover how our being is “thought” in the cosmos.
These are nothing but abstract principles, but these abstract
principles you will now find pursued everywhere in the concrete
data of the initiation method.
Now firstly — for
today we are dealing only with the form of initiation-knowledge that
is right and proper for the modern age — initiation-knowledge
takes its start from thinking. The life of thought must be
fully developed if one wishes to attain initiation-knowledge today.
And a good training for this life of thought is to give deep study to
the growth and development of natural science in recent centuries,
especially in the nineteenth century. Human beings proceed in
different ways when they embark upon the quest for scientific
knowledge. Some of them absorb the teachings of science with a kind
of naiveté, hearing how organic beings are supposed to have
evolved from the simplest, most primitive forms, up to man. They
formulate ideas about this evolution but pay little heed to their own
being, to the fact that they themselves have ideas and in their very
perception of outer processes are themselves unfolding a life of
thought.
But there are some who
cannot accept the whole body of scientific knowledge without turning
a critical eye upon themselves, and they will certainly come to the
point of asking: “What am I myself really doing when I
follow the progress of beings from the imperfect to the perfect
stage?” Or again, they must ask themselves: “When I am
working at mathematics I evolve thoughts purely out of myself.
Mathematics in the real sense is a web which I spin out of my
own being. I then bring this web to bear upon things in the outer
world and it fits them.” Here we come to what I must say is the
great and tragic question that faces the thinker: “How do
matters stand regarding thinking itself — this thinking that I
apply with all knowledge?”
Not for all our
contemplation shall we discover how matters really stand
regarding thought itself, for the simple reason that thinking there
remains at the same level. All that we do is to revolve around the
axle which we have already formed for ourselves. We must perform
something with thinking, by means of what I have described as
meditation in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its
Attainment.
One should not have any
“mystical” ideas in connection with meditation, nor
indeed imagine that it is an easy thing. Meditation must be something
completely clear, in the modern sense. Patience and inner energy of
soul are necessary for it, and, above all, it is connected with
an act that no man can do for another, namely, to make an inner
resolve and then hold to it. When he begins to meditate, man is
performing the only completely free act there is in human life.
Within us we have always the tendency to freedom and we have,
moreover, achieved a large measure of freedom. But if we think about
it, we shall find that we are dependent for one upon heredity, for
another upon education, and for a third upon our life. And ask
yourself where we would be if we were suddenly to abandon everything
that has been given us by heredity, education, and life in general.
If we abandoned all this suddenly, we would be faced with a void. But
suppose we undertake to meditate regularly, in the morning and
evening, in order to learn by degrees to look into the super-sensible
world. That is something which we can, if we like, leave undone any
day; nothing would prevent that. And, as a matter of fact,
experience teaches that the greater number of those who enter upon
the life of meditation with splendid resolutions abandon it again
very soon. We have complete freedom in this, for meditation is in its
very essence a free act. But if we can remain true to ourselves, if
we make an inner promise — not to another, but to ourselves
— to remain steadfast in our resolve to meditate, then this in
itself will become a mighty force in the soul.
Having said this, I want to
speak of meditation in its simplest forms. Today I can deal only with
principles.
We must place at the center
of our consciousness an idea or combination of ideas. The particular
content of the idea or ideas is not the point, but in any case, it
must be something that does not represent any actual
reminiscences or memories. That is why it is well not to take the
substance of a meditation from our own store of memories but to let
another, one who is experienced in such things, give the meditation.
Not, of course, because he has any desire to exercise
“suggestion,” but because in this way we may be sure that
the substance of the meditation is something entirely new for
us. It is equally good to take some ancient work which we know we
have never read before, and seek in it some passage for meditation.
The point is that we not draw the passage from the subconscious or
unconscious realms of our own being which are so apt to influence us.
We cannot be sure about anything from these realms because it will be
colored by all kinds of remains from our past life of perception and
feeling. The substance of a meditation must be as clear and
pure as a mathematical formula.
We will take this sentence
as a simple example: “Wisdom lives in the light.” At the
outset, one cannot set about testing the truth of this. It is a
picture. But we are not to concern ourselves with the intellectual
content of the words — we must contemplate them inwardly, in
the soul, we must repose in them with our consciousness. At the
beginning, we shall be able to bring to this content only a short
period of repose, but the time will become longer and longer.
What is the next stage? We
must gather together the whole human life of soul in order to
concentrate all the forces of thinking and perception within us upon
the content of the meditation. Just as the muscles of the arm
grow strong if we use them for work, so are the forces of the soul
strengthened by being constantly directed to the same content,
which should be the subject of meditation for many months, perhaps
even years. The forces of the soul must be strengthened and
invigorated before real investigation in the super-sensible world can
be undertaken.
If one continues to
practice in this way, there comes a day, I would like to call it the
great day, when one makes a certain observation. One observes an
activity of soul that is entirely independent of the body. One
realizes too that whereas one's thinking and sentient life were
formerly dependent on the body — thinking on the nerve-sense
system, feelings on the circulatory system, and so on — one is
now involved in an activity of soul and spirit that is
absolutely free from any bodily influence. And gradually one
notices that one can make something vibrate in the head —
something which remained before totally unconscious. One now makes
the remarkable discovery of where the difference lies between
the sleeping and waking states. This difference lies in the
fact that when one is awake, something vibrates in the whole human
organism, with the single exception of the head. That which is
in movement in the other parts of the organism is at rest in the
head.
You will understand this
better if I call your attention to the fact that as human beings we
are not, as we are accustomed to think, made up merely of this
robust, solid body. We are really made up of approximately ninety per
cent fluid, and the proportion of solid constituents immersed and
swimming in these fluids is only about ten per cent. Nothing
absolutely definite can be said about the amount of solid
constituents in man. We are composed of approximately ninety
per cent water — if I may call it that — and through a
certain portion of this water pulsates air and warmth.
If you thus picture man as
being to a lesser extent solid body and to a greater extent water,
air, and the vibrating warmth, you will not find it so very unlikely
that there is something still finer within him — something
which I will now call the etheric body. This etheric body is finer
than the air — so fine and ethereal indeed that it permeates
our being without our knowing anything of it in ordinary life. It is
this etheric body which in man's waking life is full of inner
movement, of regulated movement in the whole of the human organism,
with the exception of the head. The etheric body in the head is
inwardly at rest.
In sleep it is different.
Sleep commences and then continues in such a way that the
etheric body begins to be in movement also in the head. In sleep,
then, the whole of our being — the head as well as the other
parts of the organism — is permeated by an inwardly moving
etheric body. And when we dream, perhaps just before waking, we
become aware of the last movements in the etheric body. They
present themselves to us as dreams. When we wake up in a
natural way we are still aware of these last movements of the etheric
body in the head. But, of course, when there is a very sudden waking,
it cannot be so.
One who continues for a
long time in the method of meditation which I have indicated is
gradually able to form pictures in the tranquil etheric body of the
head. In the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its
Attainment, I have called these pictures Imaginations. And these
Imaginations, which are experienced in the etheric body
independently of the physical body, are the first super-sensible
impressions that we can have. They enable us, apart altogether
from our physical body, to behold, as in a picture, the actions
and course of our life back to the time of birth. A phenomenon
that has often been described by people who have been at the point of
drowning, namely that they see their life backwards in a series of
moving pictures, can be deliberately and systematically cultivated so
that one can see all the events of the present earthly life.
The first thing that
initiation-knowledge gives is the view of one's own life of soul, and
it proves to be altogether different from what one generally
supposes. One usually supposes in the abstract that this life of soul
is something woven of ideas. If one discovers it in its true form,
one finds that it is something creative, that it is that which, at
the same time, was working in our childhood, forming and molding the
brain, and is permeating our whole organism and producing in it a
plastic, form-building activity, kindling each day our waking
consciousness and even our digestive processes.
We see this inwardly active
principle in the organism of man as the etheric body. It is not a
spatial body but a time-body. Therefore you cannot describe the
etheric body as a form in space if you realize your doing so would be
the same thing as painting a flash of lightning. If you paint
lightning, you are, of course, painting an instant — you are
holding an instant fast. The same principle applies to the etheric
body of man. In truth, we have a physical space-body and a time-body,
an etheric body which is always in motion. We cannot speak
intelligently of the etheric body until we have discovered in
actual experience that it is a time-body which comes before us in an
instant as a continuous tableau of events stretching back to birth.
This is what we can first discover in the way of the super-sensible
abilities in ourselves.
The effect of these inner
processes upon the evolution of the soul, which I have described,
manifests itself above all in the complete change of mood and
disposition of soul in the man who is reaching out for
initiation-knowledge. Please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean
that he who is approaching initiation suddenly becomes an entirely
transformed person. On the contrary, modern initiation-knowledge must
leave a man wholly in the world, capable of continuing his life as
when he began. But in the hours and moments dedicated to
super-sensible investigation, man becomes, through
initiation-knowledge, completely different from what he is in
ordinary life.
Above all, I would like now
to emphasize an important moment which distinguishes
initiation-knowledge. The more a man presses forward in his
experience of the super-sensible world, the more he feels that the
influences from his own corporeality are disappearing, that is to say
regarding those things in which this corporeality takes part in
ordinary life. Let us ask ourselves, for a moment, how our
judgments occur in life. We develop as children, and grow up.
Sympathy and antipathy take firm root in our life: sympathy and
antipathy with appearances in nature, and, above all, with other
human beings. Our body takes part in all this. Sympathy and antipathy
— which to a large extent have their basis actually in physical
processes — enter quite naturally into all these things.
The moment he who is approaching initiation rises into the
super-sensible world, he passes into a realm where sympathy and
antipathy connected with his bodily nature become more and more
foreign to him. He is removed from that with which his corporeality
connects him. And when he wishes again to take up ordinary life he
must, as it were, deliberately invest in his ordinary
sympathies and antipathies, which otherwise occurs quite as a
matter of course. When one wakes in the morning, one lives within
one's body, one develops the same love for things and human beings,
the same sympathy or antipathy which one had before. If one has
tarried in the super-sensible world and wishes to return to one's
sympathies and antipathies, then one must do it with a struggle, one
must, as it were, immerse oneself in one's own corporeality.
This removal from one's own corporeality is one of the signs that one
has actually made headway. Wide-hearted sympathies and
antipathies gradually begin to unfold in one who is treading the path
to initiation.
In one direction, spiritual
development shows itself very strongly, namely in the working of the
memory and the power of remembering during initiation-knowledge. We
experience ourselves in ordinary life. Our memory, our
recollection, is sometimes a little better, sometimes a little
worse, but we earn these memories. We have experiences, and we
remember them later. This is not so with what we experience in
the super-sensible worlds. This we can experience in greatness, in
beauty, and in significance — it is experienced, then it is
gone. And it must be experienced again if it is again to stand before
the soul. It does not impress itself in the memory in the ordinary
sense. It impresses itself only if one can first, with all effort,
bring what one sees in the super-sensible world into concepts, if one
can transfer one's understanding to the super-sensible world. This is
very difficult. One must be able to think there, but without
the help of the body. Therefore one's concepts must be well grounded
in advance, one must have developed before a logical, orderly mind
and not always be forgetting one's logic when looking into the
super-sensible world. People possessed of primitive clairvoyant
faculties are able to see many things; but they forget logic when
they are there. And so it is precisely when one has to communicate
super-sensible truths to others that one becomes aware of this
transformation in the memory in reference to spiritual truths. This
shows us how much our physical body is involved in the practice of
memory, not of thought but of memory, which indeed always plays over
into the super-sensible.
If I were to say something
personal, it would be this: when I give a lecture, it is different
from when others give lectures. In others, what is said is usually
drawn from the memory; what one learns, what one thinks, is usually
developed out of the memory. But he who is really unfolding
super-sensible truths must at that very moment bring them to birth. I
can give the same lecture thirty, forty, or fifty times, and for me
it is never the same. Of course this may happen in other cases too;
but at all events the power to be independent of ordinary memory is
very greatly enhanced when this inner stage of development is
reached.
What I have now related to
you concerns the ability to bring form into the etheric body in the
head. This then makes it possible for a man to see the time-body, the
etheric body, stretching back to his birth, bringing about a very
particular frame of mind vis-à-vis the cosmos. One loses one's
own corporeality, so to speak, but one gradually becomes accustomed
to the cosmos. The consciousness expands, as it were, into the
wide spaces of the ether. One no longer contemplates a plant without
plunging into its growing. One follows it from root to blossom;
one lives in its saps, in its flowering, in its fruiting. One can
steep oneself in the life of animals as revealed by their forms, but
above all in the life of other human beings. The slightest trait
perceived in other human beings will lead one into the whole life of
the soul, so that during these super-sensible perceptions one feels
not within but outside oneself.
But one must always be able
to return. This is essential, for otherwise one is an inactive,
nebulous mystic, a dreamer — not a knower of the super-sensible
worlds. One must be able to live in these higher worlds, but at the
same time be able to bring oneself back again, so as to stand firmly
on one's own two feet. That is why in speaking of these things I
state emphatically that for me as for a good philosopher a knowledge
of how shoes and coats are sewn is almost more important than logic.
A true philosopher should be a practical human being. One must
not be thinking about life if one does not stand within it as a
really practical human being. And in the case of one who is
seeking super-sensible knowledge this is still more necessary. Knowers
of the super-sensible cannot be dreamers or fanatics — people
who do not stand firmly on their own two feet. Otherwise one loses
oneself because one must really come out of oneself. But this
coming-out-of-oneself must not lead to losing oneself. The book,
Occult Science, an Outline, was written from such a knowledge
as I have described.
Then the question is
whether one can carry this super-sensible knowledge further. This
occurs through further cultivating one's meditation. To begin with,
one rests with the meditation upon certain definite ideas or a
combination of ideas and thereby strengthens one's life of soul. But
this is not enough to enter the super-sensible world fully. Another
exercise is necessary. Not only is it necessary to rest with definite
ideas, concentrating one's whole soul upon them, but one must be
able, at will, to drive these ideas out of one's consciousness again.
Just as in material life one can look at some object and then away
from it, so in super-sensible development one must learn to
concentrate on some idea and then to drive it entirely away.
Even in ordinary life this
is far from easy. Think how little a man has under his control,
to be always impelled by his thoughts. They will often haunt him day
in and day out, especially if they are unpleasant. He cannot get rid
of them. This is a still more difficult thing to do when we have
accustomed ourselves to concentrate upon a particular thought.
A thought content upon which we have concentrated begins finally to
hold us fast and we must exert every effort to drive it away. But
after long practice we shall be able to throw the whole retrospective
tableau of life back to birth, this whole etheric body, which I have
called the time-body, entirely out of our consciousness.
This, of course, is a stage
of development towards which we must bring ourselves. We must first
mature. By the sweeping away of ideas upon which we have meditated,
we must acquire the power to rid ourselves of this colossus, this
giant in the soul. This terrible specter of our life between the
present moment and birth stands there before us — and we must
do away with it. If we eliminate it, a “more wakeful
consciousness” — if I may so express it — will
arise in us. Consciousness is fully awake but is empty. And then it
begins to be filled. Just as the air streams into the lungs when they
need it, so there streams into this empty consciousness, in the
way I have described, the true spiritual world.
This is Inspiration. It is
an in-streaming not of some finer substance but of something that is
related to substance as negative is to positive. That which is the
reverse of substance now pours into a human nature which has
become free from the ether. It is important that we can become aware
that spirit is not a finer, more ethereal substance. If we speak of
substance as positive (we might also speak of it as negative, but
that is not the point; these things are relative) — then
we speak of spirit as being the negative to the positive. Let me put
it thus: suppose I have the large sum of five shillings in my
possession. I give one shilling away and then have four shillings
left. I give another away — three shillings left, and so
on until I have no more. But then I can make debts. If I have a debt
of a shilling, then I have less than no shilling!
If, through the methods
that I have described, I have eliminated the etheric body, I do not
enter into a still finer ether, but into something that is the
reverse of the ether, as debts are the reverse of assets. Only now I
know through experience what spirit is. The spirit pours into
us through Inspiration; the first thing that we now experience
is what was with our soul and with our spirit in a spiritual world
before birth, or rather before conception. This is the pre-existent
life of our soul-spirit. Before reaching this point we saw in the
ether back to our birth. Now we look beyond conception and
birth, out into the world of soul and spirit, and behold ourselves as
we were before we came down from spiritual worlds and acquired a
physical body from the line of heredity.
In initiation-knowledge
these things are not philosophical truths that one thinks out:
they are experiences, but experiences which have to be earned
by means of the preparations I have now indicated. The first
truth that comes to us when we have entered the spiritual world is
that of the pre-existence of the human soul and the human spirit
respectively, and we learn now to behold the eternal directly.
For many centuries European
humanity has had eyes for only one aspect of eternity — namely,
the aspect of immortality. Men have asked only this: what
becomes of the soul when it leaves the body at death? This question
is the egotistical privilege of men, for men take an interest
in what follows death from an egotistical basis. We shall presently
see that we can speak of immortality too, but at all events men
usually speak of it from an egotistical basis. They are less
interested in what preceded birth. They say to themselves:
“We are here now. What went before has only worth in
knowledge.” But one will not win true worth in knowledge
unless one also directs one's attention to existence as it was before
birth, or rather, before conception.
We need a word in modern
parlance with which to complete the idea of eternity. For we
should not speak only of immortality; we should speak also of
Ungeborenheit — Unborn-ness — a
word difficult to translate. Eternity has these two aspects:
immortality and unborn-ness. And initiation-knowledge discovers
unborn-ness before immortality.
A further stage along the
path to the super-sensible world can be reached if we now try to make
our activity of soul and spirit still freer of the support from the
body. To this end we now gradually guide the exercises in meditation
and concentration to become exercises for the will.
As a concrete example, let
me lead you to a simple exercise for strengthening the will. It
will help you to be able to study the principle here involved. In
ordinary life we are accustomed to think with the course of the
world. We let things come to us as they happen. That which comes to
us earlier, we think of first, and that which comes to us later, we
think of later. And even if we do not think with the course of time
in more logical thought, there is always in the background the
tendency to keep to the outward, actual course of events. Now in
order to exercise our forces of spirit and soul we must get free of
the outer cause of things. A good exercise — and one which is
at the same time an exercise for the will — is to try to
think back over our day's experiences, not as they occurred
from morning to evening, but backwards, from evening to morning,
entering as much as possible into details.
Suppose in this backward
review we come to the moment when, during the day, we walked up a
staircase. We think of ourselves at the top step, then at the one
before the top, and so on, down to the bottom. We go down that
staircase backwards in thought. To begin with we will only be in the
position to visualize episodes of the day in this backward order, say
from six o'clock to three o'clock, or from twelve to nine, and so on
to the moment of waking. But gradually we shall acquire a kind of
technique by means of which, in the evening or the next morning, we
are actually in a position to let a retrospective tableau of
the experiences of the day or the day before pass before our
soul in pictures. If we are in the position — and we will
arrive at it — to free ourselves completely from the kind of
thought which follows three-dimensional reality, we will see what a
tremendous power our will becomes. We will reach this also if we can
arrive at the position where we can experience the notes of a melody
backwards, or visualize a drama in five acts, beginning with the
fifth, then the fourth, and so on, to the first act. Through all such
exercises we strengthen the power of will, for we invigorate it
inwardly and free it from its bondage to events in the material
world.
Here again, exercises I
have indicated in previous lectures can be appropriate if we
take stock of ourselves and realize that we have acquired this or
that habit. We now take ourselves firmly in hand and apply an iron
will in order within two years or so to have changed this particular
habit into a different one. To take only a simple example:
something of a man's character is contained in his handwriting.
If we strain ourselves to acquire a handwriting bearing no
resemblance to what it was before, this takes a strong inner force.
Now this second handwriting must become quite as much a habit, just
as fluent as the first. That is only a trivial matter but there are
many things whereby the fundamental direction of our will may be
changed through our own efforts. Gradually we bring it to the
point where not only is the spiritual world received in us as
Inspiration, but actually our spirit, freed from the body, is
submerged in other spiritual beings outside of us. For true spiritual
knowledge is a submerging in spiritual beings who are spiritually all
around us when we look back at physical phenomena. If we would know
the spiritual, we must first, as it were, get outside
ourselves. I have already described this. But then we must also
acquire the ability to sink ourselves into things, namely into
spiritual things and spiritual beings.
We can do this only after
we also practice such initiation exercises as I have described,
bringing us to the point where our own body is no longer a disturbing
element but where we can submerge ourselves in the spirituality of
things, where the colors of the plants no longer merely appear to us,
but where we plunge into the colors themselves; where we do not only
color the plants, but see them color themselves. Not only do we know
that the chicory blossom growing by the wayside is blue, when we
contemplate it; but we can submerge ourselves inwardly in the blossom
itself, in the process whereby it becomes blue. And from that point
we can extend our spiritual knowledge more and more.
Various symptoms will
indicate that these exercises have really been the means of progress.
I will mention two, but there are many. The first lies in the fact
that we receive a way of viewing the moral world completely different
from before. For pure intellectualism, the moral world has
something unreal about it. Of course, if a man has abided by
the laws of decent behavior in the age of materialism, he will feel
it incumbent upon him to do what is right according to well-worn
tradition. But even if he does not admit it, he thinks to himself:
when I do what is right, there is not so much taking place as when
lightning strikes through space or when thunder rolls across the sky.
He does not think it real in the same sense. But when one lives
within the spiritual world one becomes aware that the moral
world-order not only has the reality of the physical world, but has a
higher reality. Gradually one learns to understand that this whole
age with its physical constituents and processes may perish, may
disintegrate, but that the moral influences which flow out of us
strongly endure. The reality of the moral world dawns upon us. The
physical and the moral world, “being” and
“becoming,” become one. We actually experience that the
world has moral laws as objective laws.
This increases
responsibility in relation to the world. It gives us a totally
different consciousness — a consciousness of which present-day
humanity stands in sore need. For modern mankind looks back to the
earth's beginning, where the earth is supposed to have been formed
out of a primeval mist. Life is thought to have arisen out of the
same mist, then man himself, and from man — as a Fata Morgana
— the world of ideas. Mankind looks ahead to a death of warmth,
to a time when all that mankind lives within must become submerged in
a great tomb, and they need a knowledge of the moral
world-order which can only be received fundamentally through fully
obtaining spiritual knowledge. This I can only indicate.
But the other aspect is
that one cannot reach this Intuitive knowledge, this submerging
in outer things, without passing through intense suffering, much more
intense than the pain of which I had to speak when I characterized
Imaginative knowledge, when I said that through one's own efforts one
must find the way back into one's sympathies and antipathies —
and that inevitably means pain. But now pain becomes a cosmic
experiencing of all suffering that rests upon the ground of
existence.
One can easily ask why the
Gods or God created suffering. Suffering must be there if the
world is to arise in its beauty. That we have eyes — I will use
popular language here — is simply due to the fact that to begin
with, in a still undifferentiated organism, the organic forces
were excavated which lead to sight and which, in their final
metamorphosis, become the eye. If we were still aware today of the
minute processes which go on in the retina in the act of sight, we
should realize that even this is fundamentally the existence of a
latent pain. All beauty is grounded in suffering. Beauty can only be
developed from pain. And one must be able to feel this pain, this
suffering. Only through this can we really find our way into the
super-sensible world, by going through this pain. To a lesser degree,
and at a lower stage of knowledge, this can already be said. He
who has acquired even a little knowledge will admit to you: for the
good fortune and happiness I had in life, I have my destiny to thank;
but only through pain and suffering have I been able to acquire my
knowledge.
If one realizes this
already at the beginning of a more elementary knowledge, it can
become a much higher experience when one becomes master of
oneself, when one reaches out through the pain that is experienced as
cosmic pain to the stage of “neutral” experience in the
spiritual world. One must work through to a point where one lives
with the coming-into-existence and the essential nature of all
things. This is Intuitive knowledge. But then one is also completely
within an experience of knowledge that is no longer bound to the
body; thus one can return freely to the body, to the material world,
to live until death, but now fully knowing what it means to be real,
to be truly real in soul and spirit, outside the body.
If one has understood this,
then one has a picture of what happens when the physical body is
abandoned at death, and what it means to pass through the gate of
death. Having risen to Intuitive knowledge, one has
foreknowledge, which is also experience, of the reality that
the soul and spirit pass into a world of soul and spirit when the
body is abandoned at death. One knows what it is to function in a
world where no support comes from the body. Then, when this knowledge
has been embodied in concepts, one can return again to the body. But
the essential thing is that one learns to live altogether
independently of the body, and thereby acquires knowledge of what
happens when the body can no longer be used, when one lays it aside
at death and passes over into a world of soul and spirit.
And again, what results
from initiation-knowledge on the subject of immortality is not a
philosophical speculation but an experience — or rather a
pre-experience — if I may so express myself. One knows what one
will then be. One experiences, not the full reality, but a
picture of reality, which in a certain way corresponds with the full
reality of death. One experiences immortality. Here too, you see,
experience is drawn into and becomes part of knowledge.
I have tried now to
describe to you how one rises through Imagination to Inspiration and
Intuition, and how one finally through this becomes acquainted with
one's full reality. In the body one learns to perceive oneself, so
long as one remains within that body. The soul and spirit must be
freed from the body, for then one becomes for the first time a whole
man. Through what we perceive through the body and its senses,
through the ordinary thinking which, arising from the
sense-experiences, is bound up with the body, especially with the
nerve-sense system, one becomes acquainted with only a limb of
man. We cannot know the whole, full man unless we have the will to
rise to the modes of knowledge which come out of
initiation-science.
Once again I would like to
emphasize: if these things are investigated, everyone who approaches
the results with an unprejudiced mind can understand them with
ordinary, healthy human reason — just as he can understand what
astronomers or biologists have to say about the world. The results
can be tested, and indeed one will find that this testing is the
first stage of initiation-knowledge. For initiation-knowledge,
one must first have an inclination towards truth, because truth, not
untruth and error, is one's object. Then one who follows this path
will be able, if destiny makes it possible, to penetrate further and
further into the spiritual world during this earthly life. In our
day, and in a higher way, the call inscribed over the portal of a
Greek temple must be fulfilled: “Man, know thyself!”
Those words were not a call to man to retreat into his inner life but
a demand to investigate into the being of man: into the being
of immortality = body; into the being of unborn-ness = immortal
spirit; and into the mediator between the earth, the temporal, and
the spirit = soul. For the genuine, the true man consists of body,
soul, and spirit. The body can know only the body; the soul can know
only the soul; the spirit can know only the spirit. Thus we must seek
to find active spirit within us in order to be able to perceive the
spirit also in the world.
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