The
Relation of the Human Being to the Supersensible Worlds
Berlin, 19 October 1911
In the next months as already in the past
winters, I would like to hold talks about objects and interests
of spiritual science, the science of the supersensible
worlds.
If one speaks of a science of the
supersensible worlds today, one still meets many a
prejudice and opposition. This
is comprehensible. Since someone who
knows the cultural development of the last years or decades has
to admit without further ado that the cultural development was
reluctant generally to accept researches about the
supersensible world in any sense. If one even demanded as it
happened in the past winter talks and will also further happen
that these talks have a scientific character in all their
appearance and make a claim to place themselves beside other
scientific considerations, then these prejudices are even
bigger. Indeed, one has to admit that recently within our
cultural life the need has grown up to turn the sight to the
supersensible worlds to receive sense and understanding of the
whole human life from this knowledge of the supersensible world
to gain power in our so complex life for the demands of the
outer world. A growing longing for knowledge of the
supersensible worlds exists.
However, on the other side one
cannot deny that the present human being demands scientific
justification of spiritual science in certain respect. One has
to admit now that today many circles completely deny any
scientific nature to a consideration of the supersensible
worlds from the point of view of the present science. One
denies this while one takes two quite different points of view
that find, but many representatives just in our time with those
who have the longing to grow out from the old traditions that
are there to satisfy the supersensible needs.
What the outer science can supply today
what in particular the so admirable natural sciences can
deliver is enough to give the human being an satisfying view of
the world someday which must satisfy any longing for a world
view. Only that worldview could satisfy, one says, which simply
summarises the scientific or other as scientifically approved
results to get an idea about the solution of the world riddles
from its totality. Others say against it, indeed, we can
form a worldview on basis of modern sciences; but this view is
not enough for the indelible need for knowledge of the human
soul. Everything that we can know about the world with only
outer science proves to us almost that this outer science is
not suitable to answer the big questions of existence anyhow.
Everywhere a precise knowledge of the outer science points to
the undergrounds of that what this science supplies. —
Within these circles there are those people again who admit,
indeed, that everywhere in the world are references to
something supersensible, and that the outer science is never
enough to receive a satisfying idea of the solution of the
world riddles that still say that the human cognitive faculties
and knowledge are limited. He would exceed the limits of his
efficiency and knowledge in scientific respect if he wanted to
penetrate into this supersensible world.
Thus, we realise that just from that
spiritual life with which spiritual science wants to be in
harmony prejudices and opposition arise against it. Hence, it
is necessary at the beginning of this course of talks to
discuss programmatically whether the human being can get a
relation to the supersensible worlds. More careful spirits have
always admitted —
also in the recent heyday of natural
sciences — that the human being must have such a relation to the
supersensible worlds, and that he is just unable maybe to
penetrate with his cognitive forces into these supersensible
worlds.
If one can often hear about such
discussions, as they should be done here in this talks, that
this is basically an unauthorised fantasy on the supersensible
worlds, and if one has to find such a thing comprehensible, one
can point on the other side to point also to the fact that at
least more careful thinkers and researchers have always
admitted that it is no arbitrariness of the human soul to
conclude from that what the outer science can give that
everything points in our surroundings to supersensible worlds
at last.
Let me point to an older and to a recent
fact out of a range of many facts and initiate that what I want
to bring to mind then in the other talks by the
spiritual-scientific research itself. Let me initiate with the
fact that the science of the last decades did not induce those
who know it really to deny the supersensible worlds. On the
other hand, one can also already say for the expert of the
scientific point of view that our outer science is so far that
it feels already constrained to admit a certain knowledge of
supersensible worlds at least in a limited measure. This strict
science also disproves most seriously, what many popular
worldviews present as a materialistic or monistic
worldview.
I would like to point to an older fact at
first: to a researcher who stood within the glamorous activity
of modern natural sciences who performed a lot in a narrowly
defined specialty, but kept open his look to everything that
outer science cannot offer. This researcher once said the
following unforgettable words: the view is admirable which
natural sciences can give in their theories of that what
underlies the material effects and the natural forces as
diverse nuclear effects. However, this researcher was of the
opinion that it would be a fatal illusion to believe that
something is included in the scientific views and theories that
would exclude a metaphysical need, that is a need for a
knowledge of the supersensible world or at least of the
assumption of a supersensible world. It would be a fatal
mistake if one believed that everything that natural sciences
can give is only something that corresponds to the outer view.
One would always have to found it on something exceeding this
view.
The naturalist concerned pronounced this in
a time, when the less strict thinkers, so the daredevils of
modern natural sciences celebrated those thoughts which wanted
to exclude any idea of the human being of a supersensible
world. — I do not tell the saying of a naturalist which was
possibly sickened by any mysticism, which would have been burdened
philosophically, or which would have been done possibly in a
mystic meeting. The statement that I have just mentioned was
done in 1867 in the dawn of the materialistic natural science
of the last century in the Vienna Academy of Sciences by the
famous clinician and pioneer of medical science Karl von
Rokitansky (1804–1878). Someone admits that who knows the
entire being and the essence of natural sciences.
I would like to mention another fact. Who
could believe that today a science owes its greatness more to
outer experimental researches of those thinkers who founded it
upon these outer researches and experiments than physics? On
one side, what could one bring in more than the physical
achievements of our time as typical for the scientific thinking
of the present? On the other side, one brings the achievements
forward repeatedly if one wants to refute the possibility that
the human being might have to deal with matters of the
supersensible world.
However, if now a physicist came and said,
you have to say goodbye to the physical thinking of the
present, or at least many facts and research results are there
that you have to say goodbye to an
idea with which so many hopes were connected just for the
purely scientific approach? — For example, to the
materially imagined ether which one regarded, so to speak, as a
kind of magic cure for all outer natural phenomena long time.
Since phenomena like light, heat, electricity and so on should
be explained only by the fact that one assumed the so-called
ether as the subtlest material hypothetically behind that what
our senses perceive. While one imagined this ether materially,
one did not hesitate to attribute to it also that in some
processes of that material ether, which fulfils us, the
spiritual, the supersensible experiences of the human being
would have their origin. For everything that one attributes,
otherwise, to a spiritual, supersensible world this material
ether became a kind of magician and explainer. What happens, if
now a physicist came and said that certain things within the
physical research make us assume such a connection of the
natural forces, which allows us imagining that without the
requirement of a material ether the rays of light would pass
through the space? What happens, if this physicist said, one
must already suppose from certain facts today that the light
waves travel through the space without a material
medium?
If this physicist said also, indeed, this
violates any kind of mechanical explanation of nature, but if
the physical facts require this, just the mechanical view of
nature is hopelessly lost. If then he still went on and said,
what has to replace the ether? Then something would have to
replace it to which above all one has to attribute no material
quality. Now something strange has
to replace this ether. — I must stress
repeatedly: for the purposes of modern physics,
something strange has to replace the
ether, namely purely mathematical equations. These are
thoughts, structures of thought. What continues as structures
of thought, this should continue not through matter, but
— as one
says academically —
through the vacuum, through the empty
space. This one considers as necessary with respect to the
light that is not bound to any material substance.
If some time ago anybody had said this, one
would have probably assumed that this man is a tricky
representative of a spiritual worldview, because only such can
state that the light flows without material medium through the
space. But no mystic said this, one did not say this in a
meeting where one can dish up all possible things to the
people, but the physicist of the Berlin University said this,
Max Planck (1858–1947), in September, 1910 on the 82-nd
Conference of German Naturalists in Königsberg
(now: Kaliningrad). This fact is still
much more important than the just mentioned one, namely because
we only have not heard here what we have heard from the
clinician Karl von Rokitansky: the fact that nature herself
points everywhere to a supersensible world, — but that in the
thoughts of the physicist which he really writes with
mathematical signs on the paper something is included that is
not bound to any material medium. That is we have not only
admitted that pure thoughts, spiritual effects, are somewhere
in the unknown, but that physics must recognise this in its
real knowledge what is not only material what carries something
supersensible through space.
With it, we see science at that gate where
it must not be content to say only, there may be a
supersensible world, but the human knowledge cannot penetrate
into it. — But now it concedes that the thoughts which science
makes not only refer to the outside world which consists only
in the materials and is impregnated by matter, but that the
knowledge which one has refers to something spiritual, to
something supersensible! With it, the evidence is supplied from
the conditions of our time for someone who knows the
development of science really that today it is out-of-date to
say that supersensible knowledge cannot claim any validity
within science. Then perhaps one may consider it not so
fantastic if the spiritual scientist says that with such
concessions only science just gains a path which must lead on
and on, because the things develop for the moment from their
beginnings to the recognition of the reality of that which the
human being can survey with his cognitive forces regarding a
supersensible world.
If the human being wants to penetrate into
the supersensible world, he turns to the contemplation of
thoughts of the world at first. We do not apply the word
philosophy; the essentials are a contemplation of thoughts.
Since this becomes soon clear to a human being that he cannot
come to the depths of the things by the mere outer view
— it may
be scientific ever so much.
There the human being turns to the
contemplation of thoughts and tries to get an idea of the
solution of the world riddles within the thoughts. Someone who
wants to draw a picture of the world out of material facts only
depends also on the way to make a view of that which underlies
the world. From thoughts, everything also originated what, for
example, Ernst Haeckel contributes to a worldview, although he
rests on the outer scientific knowledge. Whether somebody rests
more or less on the outer science or whether science comes to
an idealistic or spiritual worldview, in both cases one has to
apply thoughts. The thought has a peculiarity if we dedicate
ourselves to it. Which characteristic this thought has, this
proves the fact that many people regard the research of
thoughts, the philosophical reflection as unpleasant or at
least as uncomfortable.
Since the Greek period, there have always
been philosophers. Not only students in the sweat of their
brows delve into that by necessity which the reflection about
the world riddles wants to supply, but also many people who
want to get clarification about life out of the whole warmth of
their hearts, who maybe want to receive peace and harmony in
their souls regard that as rather dry and sober and also as
abstract and uncomfortable what is brought forward about the
solution of the world riddles in theoretical books, in
philosophy. Someone who is full of life who stands as a
practitioner in life and feels attracted by that what life
gives directly feels easily repelled from the sobriety and
abstractness of many writings and talks that want to penetrate
by work of thought into supersensible worlds.
Nevertheless, this is something that one
probably gets to know with many people. However, as brilliant
the philosophical systems about the world riddles appear to
those who can pursue them by the preconditions of their lives,
as unenjoyable such ways are for practical persons standing in
life. Still those people who created such systems of thoughts
from a serious thirst for knowledge felt in such a way that
they said, with this work of thought a picture is given of the
supersensible facts, actually, underlying the world.
— Somebody
who is able to admire what these thinkers have done knows how
much ingenuity and dedication was applied to penetrate on this
way of thinking into the world. Then he also knows which deep
satisfaction one can feel about the solution of the world
riddles in the philosophical systems of great thinkers. They
are by no means only abstract, but the thinkers put their
hearts and souls in their systems even if those seem
abstract.
If it concerns such philosophical systems,
one cannot deny one thing which, but someone does not feel who
is a born philosopher or can experience his joy and
satisfaction in abstract thoughts who is attached to such a
system of thoughts with warmth, with his humanity and with the
deepest need for an intrusion in the supersensible world. What
such a thinker feels, I would like to bring to mind at the
example of a thinker who experienced a tragic destiny then who
dealt with the big questions of the conceptual solution of the
world riddles in the time when he spoke about that
perceptively and insistently of which the
talk should be now. I mean Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). We
can completely disregard what he became later.
You find that what I want to characterise
here in the early years of his work where he worked out
lectures at the University of Basel that one published in his
posthumous works. These were lectures on the Greek thinkers
under the title
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,
that is, before Socrates where the great thinkers interest us
like Thales, Heraclitus, and Parmenides particularly. We are
interested in them because you can realise how from a lively
thinking, from the Greek worldview and culture, which stood
really in life and were full of immediate life, the system of
ideas of Parmenides emerged. It intended to penetrate into the
supersensible worlds, but ascended from the old full-juicy
Greek world to the abstract thoughts of “primordial
being” and “primordial non-existence.” A
human being gets goose pimples who stands, otherwise, in the
practical life if anybody grasps such abstract concepts like
“primordial being” and “primordial
non-existence” to reach the supersensible worlds. Even
somebody who is used dealing philosophically with the questions
of existence says to himself: it makes my blood freeze in my
veins if I notice that a human being ascends to such thoughts
from which all life seems squeezed like the juice from a lemon
which appear too sober, dry and abstract to the other human
beings. This chapter was interesting
to Nietzsche because it shows how a thinker rises directly from
life to an abstract world of thoughts. Nietzsche felt the
thoughts of Parmenides so colorless, soulless, so completely
bared of that what the heart longs for. Nevertheless, someone
who deals with spiritual science understands Parmenides when he
speaks of it so that it makes your blood freeze in your veins
due to these dried up abstractions and if he shows that even in
the most marvellous edifice of ideas something is contained
that appears sober to us. There we get the feeling: how do you
want to grasp the depths of this world, which faces us so
lively, with the spider's web of your thoughts? However, in
such a sensation is just the starting point of that what must
exist in the human soul if one should attain the relation to
the supersensible worlds.
Even the greatest philosopher — who spins
out systems of thoughts with certain ease who can climb up to
abstractions and says to himself, in these abstractions you
have the truth of the things — gets only around to
painting nothing but a picture with such thoughts even if they
are ever so thin like cobwebs and ever so abstract. However,
you must say to yourself, such a picture can never completely
exhaust the wealth of that what must form the basis of the
world. Somebody who puts such a worldview in thoughts as a
thinker may feel satisfied in a way, but somebody who stands in
the full life has a right to say to himself, such an edifice of
ideas can never exhaust the full life and with it also never
the depths of life.
Someone who wants to go the path to the
spiritual worlds has to strengthen this edifice of ideas in a
particular way and he has to pursue it until its ultimate
consequences. You find all other details in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
Here it can concern only of giving the most
important points of view about the way that the human being
must take if he wants to attain real knowledge of the
supersensible world. One must say that everybody can feel if he
gets involved with mere edifices of ideas that he gets cold
spiritually that he feels in such a way as if he had not
approached the world, but would have gone away from the
full-juicy existence as if he had really expressed the juice
from existence like from a lemon.
However, one has to feel something else,
namely enthusiasm for the crystalline clearness, the wonderful
architecture of a system of ideas, so that one can say in a
way: what is apparently so abstract is still the greatest
achievements of thinking which the human being can experience,
and which show how the conceptual creating prevails in the
universe. —
Thus, one has to bring enthusiasm into the
worlds that can appear so empty because of their abstractions.
Indeed, a thinker who only thinks and cannot feel
enthusiasm for the thoughts weaving through the universe can
never penetrate into the supersensible world.
This is only one side of that what one must
feel if one wants to set up relations with the supersensible.
The other side is an experience of the spiritual researchers:
namely the fact that you have ascended to thoughts, but that
you feel, as if you has lost the firm ground under your feet
and you hover over an abyss. As long as you have pleasure in
the thoughts and you feel firm in the thoughts, you cannot
ascend to the supersensible world. Not before you feel
something in pursuing the thoughts that has a double
comparison: as if we lose the ground under our feet and have to
hover in the emptiness, or as if we see the extending blue
vault of heaven, and we recognise that the blue vault of heaven
is no blue vault of heaven, but you yourself whose faculty of
sight does not reach so far surround the universe with a blue
vault of heaven. In truth, it extends into the infinite, and
you have to ask, where is a firm point? Not before you feel
that with an inner uncertainty with which you nail up your
glance and cause the inkling of an infinite at the same time
and then imagine this sensation increased, you can feel
something of that which someone has to feel strongly who
creates thoughts about the world connections but wants to
penetrate through them into the living feeling of spiritual
facts and beings. Then he feels, as if he nails up the way with
his thoughts where the spiritual beings live where the spirit
is working.
What I have told I have not fantastically
thought up, I have also not taken it from thoughts. It is an
experience of all those who have searched the way into the
supersensible worlds. This can become an experience, as I have
described it in the book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?
What I characterised that way as a sensation
increases in a way and increases with that who goes the path of
knowledge up to a feeling like fear, a feeling of uncertainty.
One could characterise it as a state where one does not know
where one is. However, this feeling must not develop
completely, it must remain in the depths of the soul; and then
only we can penetrate into the supersensible world. This
feeling must be illuminated straight away by that what you can
compare with the feeling of courage, of energy, of willpower.
The human being has to become aware of something in himself
during the slow, patient progress if he gets on it repeatedly:
you do this not only, or you decide not only to do that for
which you have an outer cause, but you put the ideal to
yourself to do this or that from your own thoughts and not to
lose the thought of it and the undeterred intention for
it.
If we do this repeatedly in life and
develop it systematically, it gives us an idea that we can
receive from no outer world and no outer view, which we can get
out of the depths of the soul. If we can develop this feeling
when we rise to pure thinking which is free of sensuousness and
not taken from the outer world, then something forms in us that
you must experience that you can also experience, but as you
experience a physical or chemical experiment. In the
self-experiment of the soul, you experience that you become
free from any view and knowledge that you can attain only with
the tools of the physical body. We become free from the
physical body and penetrate into that world about which we can
spin, otherwise, only webs of thoughts. Then that not really
exists which many people know solely about such
coming-out-of-oneself, which they know from an experiment
destroying the human consciousness, but it means becoming free
from the sensory existence and the sensory view. The human
being penetrates with his own being about which he knows that
it has an independent reality compared with the physical body,
into that world which is a supersensible one because he
experiences it as a supersensible one. If anybody said, you can
imagine this, one could give him only by logical reasons a view
of what one experiences in the supersensible worlds, and what
the human being is as a supersensible being. However, somebody
who penetrates into the supersensible world knows that he comes
on this way to a reality of supersensible kind whose reality he
recognises and about which he knows that it is nothing
fantastic, as he knows this about the outer sensory
world.
What I have described of the supersensible
world that way is only one direction to which we must go if we
want to gain a relation to the supersensible worlds. There is
something else. I have described the way through the thoughts
what we call meditation spiritual-scientifically, delving into
inner experiences of thoughts. This is one direction. The other
direction is that by which the human being can experience
something that differs from all experiences of thought. All
experiences of thought are in such a way that they have
something abstract and impersonal. One must feel this to bring
such feelings, as I have just characterised, into the mental
deepening, into meditation, and you discover that if you ascend
with thinking to the spiritual being you arrive at the
supersensible world. Nevertheless, the question must arise, can
the human being come only on the way of thinking into
reality?
In order to answer this question, I must
point to another side of the relation of the human being to the
supersensible worlds. As well as the human being wanders in the
universe, in spatial spheres on the just characterised way he
can also penetrate into his own being. But then he comes to
something that leads him away also from the thought as the just
characterised way has led him to the thought, because the
materialistic science of thought like that of which I will at
once speak leads away from the thought. Materialistic science
of thought shows that the thinking is bound to the cerebral
process that one finds that thinking everywhere in the world
which is bound to the brain.
But when the human being returns from
thinking to himself and gets clear about himself and realises
how the thoughts and his whole intellectual life rise like foam
bubbles from the depths of the sea of his soul life, then there
is something to experience where from the thought arises.
Indeed, there a deep dissatisfaction comes into being if the
thoughts should be only foam bubbles on the surface of the
surging sea of the soul life. Since if they were this, the
world would be pointless. This is an emotional experience for
that who understands the meaning of life. But now I want to
characterise how one gets to something by another direction
that is relieved from the abstract thought which refers us to
ourselves, and which is free from thought which lacks what I
have just described as the abstract and sober of rational
knowledge.
The other direction gives us the mystic
experience. The human being who submerges in his emotional
world and strives for true self-knowledge who is able to turn
the eyes away from that what surrounds us in the world comes to
where the great mystics have come. If we look at these mystics,
we hear from them that they experience the highest in their
inside which they imagine as divine that prevails in the
universe. Inside of the human being a divine spark also lives.
You find this, for example, repeatedly in such mystic
discussions, with Master Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and many
others. This is an immediate mystic experience.
However, this mystic experience always
shows something typical that the opponents always put forward.
For this mystic experience has something individual. A mystic
who can experience the divine spark in his soul who informs us
about the world and its innermost being, and just that who
experiences this strongest says: it is an inner experience of
such deepness that human concepts, as one applies them,
otherwise, to the things and facts, cannot transmit the
experience. —
The deepest mystics agree just with the
fact that they can bring this experience by no means in
thoughts or even in words if they feel one with that what
pulsates through the world as something divine. The mystics say
that you can experience it, but you cannot bring it in
thoughts. Hence, one can transmit it not in the common mental
pictures to others, but every human being can experience the
world riddle only personally.
Usually you believe to have thoughts.
However, that means again that you do not attain the divine
world contents. You can read that with all mystics who
described it. The soul meets inner enemies there. Then the
human being can no longer say, if I feel this or that
ascending, feel this or that passion, experience this or that
and so on, then I am master of that. — No! Then the human
being feels, as if inner enemies seized him and he cannot
become master of them at first, but he must become master of
them, if he wants to break down what separates him from his
innermost being and with it from the inner being of the world.
There one starts feeling that in our inside that comes up what
is more than that what we know by thought what pours forth
about our self. Then it becomes necessary to search forces with
which we overcome it. There certain feelings must penetrate the
mystic again. Since when the mystics only stressed: you only
need to penetrate in yourself, then you experience God, then
that would be again a complacent contemplation, as the
complacent life in thoughts and ideas.
If one wants to come to reality, one has to
experience a particular way of feeling which one can define in
the following way. Some of you have certainly found it
confirmed in the everyday life. We all know pains and
sufferings. We start from a suffering at first that you can get
to know most simply. Everybody knows how agonising physical
pains and sufferings can be. But he also knows that maybe if
pain increases more and more it reaches a strength where it can
change over to a certain stage of bliss, even of desire. This
was used where one tormented people whom one wanted to give an
understanding of the sources of existence, so that the pain
became so strong that it changed over to the opposite. There
are such stages in which one feels something in pain that
appears like a kind of desire and bliss. Someone has to feel
something similar, but not identical, who immerses himself in
his inside where he overcomes everything with his whole power
that is hostile to him. You get an image of it if you read the
mystics who describe how they exerted themselves to fight
against all temptations of passion, of egoism. Besides,
egoism, passion grow bigger and bigger. It is a low level of
contemplation if one does not feel passion and egoism growing
as our enemies.
If you have then the power to overcome
these inner conditions of temptation, then you penetrate into
the depths of the soul where the sub-sensory soul-life begins
what exceeds the mere sensory life. However, you must not
understand the described things in the trivial sense. There one
can easily say, these are subjective experiences by which one
attains no true knowledge. — But if they are
understood in such a way as I have meant them here, one knows:
if you descend in your inside and must call the strong forces
of overcoming, you get to something that does not apply only to
the one or the other human being, but that everybody can
experience with the entry into the supersensible
world.
If the human beings have come once by such
a way to the supersensible world, they know for sure that the
human being has a relation to a world that reaches beyond the
senses, the usual mind, and reason. They also recognise that
the human being is rooted with his whole existence in a world
that does not come into being and does not pass like the
sensory world, but is everlasting.
Today it mattered to describe the relation
of the human being to the supersensible world. In the next
talk, I speak about the topic how the human being can attain a
scientific knowledge of the most important problems, of the
longings and of everything that is close to us in life, of
death and immortality. In the course of the talks we shall
realise that such ways, such relations of the human being to
the supersensible worlds, as I have described them today, are
scientific in the same sense as a physical, chemical, or
biological science are scientific. Since if one alludes to the
impossibility of such knowledge of the supersensible, one
argues:
If we examine the forces that the human
being has for science, for cognition, we realise that his
cognitive faculties are limited that he is unable to penetrate
in a supersensible world. — However, no serious
spiritual scientist who states there that the supersensible
worlds are recognisable in the same sense as the sensory world
will say that the usual cognitive forces — if one speaks of the
inaccessibility of the supersensible world — can lead into this
world. What the philosophers and naturalists understand by the
cognitive forces if they say, the cognitive forces of the human
being must keep away from a world that could lead only to
speculative fiction, —
about those forces the true spiritual
researcher must also say, these forces cannot lead into the
supersensible world! If you ever so strictly examine
philosophically what the human being is capable of with his
usual cognitive forces, even so, one will always have to
answer: these cognitive forces are inappropriate to lead into
the supersensible world.
If you consider the whole course of the
today's discussion, you realise that I have nowhere claimed
that the human being can penetrate with the usual cognitive
forces into supersensible worlds. However, I have said that the
human being must only go through a way from the point of view
where he stands to another point of view. He has to ascend from
those cognitive forces of which one rightly says that they
cannot lead into a supersensible world, to other forces that
are suitable to reach the supersensible world.
As little it is right to state that a blind
person sees colours, it is right that a blind person if one
operates him can use his eyes and can see the world of
colours.
As much of Kantianism is right that the
usual cognitive forces are insufficient for the knowledge of
something supersensible, it is as true that the human being can
get cognitive forces with which he is able to penetrate into
the worlds that seem so distant. Spiritual science does not
start from the use of the usual cognitive forces, but from
those, which one has to attain first. This means at the same
time that the human being grows into the supersensible
world.
On one side, the human being can find the
way into cosmic distances and depths of space and get
connection with the supersensible worlds. On the other side, he
can also come by that what is deeper than the usual
consciousness, by his own spiritual, breaking through the usual
layers of the soul life, in that which is supersensible or
sub-sensory which coincides with that which he finds
outside.
Since that which the human being finds in
such a way is related intimately with him. If the human being
finds the way by meditation to cosmic distances and distant
worlds and takes such sensations and emotions along as I have
described them, he meets, indeed, strange spiritual worlds, but
he meets those to which he is related and in which he has his
origin.
If he finds the way through himself, he
enters into spiritual worlds that one cannot grasp with the
usual consciousness that yet exist really as his spiritual
subsoil. There he finds himself again. If he compares what he
finds by immersing in his inside, and what he finds by
expanding his consciousness outward, it is the same: the true
spiritual being of the human being and his real origin. He
opens himself to worlds which are spiritual and in which the
human being has his origin as the old mystics said.
Then the human being can find deepest
satisfaction from these worlds if he makes them accessible to
his knowledge to satisfy the highest longings in his soul that
wanted the question answered: what is the best in myself that
has to exist in a sense quite different from that what is as a
material world round me? — But then the
human being also finds what he needs of working power, joy of
life, yes, possibility of life and health of life. Since this
results from such a deepening in the world if we penetrate
ourselves with forces which are brought up from the deepest
depths of our soul, which were brought from cosmic distances to
stand firmly on the ground on which we can work and recognise a
sense of existence. If I may summarise what the today's
consideration should give what like a tonic has to sound
through the whole series of lectures about the supersensible
worlds, I would like to do this with the words:
In cosmic distances
Recognising human being,
In soul depths
Experiencing world forces,
The human being attains
Right world knowledge
By true self-knowledge.
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