The
Spiritual World and Spiritual Science
Berlin,
30 October 1913
As now already since a number of years, I
will also try in this winter to hold some talks from the fields
of spiritual science. I will also try in this winter to light
up different fields of life and knowledge from this
spiritual-scientific point of view. Hence, I may ask you today
like during the past years again to consider the today's talk
not so much as a single one, but to look at the whole cycle of
these talks as a more or less unified whole, although I will
possibly try to round any single talk, too.
I would like to touch the fields of the
spiritual, the moral, and the artistic life in this course of
lectures to show how spiritual science can become an
enlightening cultural factor for the most different questions
that the soul of the present must realise justifiably. It is by
no means an approved or popular viewpoint in the present from
which I hold these talks. On the contrary, the viewpoint of
spiritual science is treated in adversary way and is often
misunderstood. Immediately from the start, I may say that about
this view of spiritual-science someone is surprised least of
all, who stands on this point of view. Since how much is
brought forward from the mental pictures and the habitual ways
of thinking of the present against this spiritual
science — with supposed right — even today; someone
understands that best of all who has penetrated just into this
spiritual science thoroughly. Contradiction, opposition, and misunderstanding are
quite comprehensible to me. One can find misunderstandings in
different fields. There on side one believes that this
spiritual science establishes on some old, Oriental or other
confessions because one believes to recognise a certain
resemblance of single points with that what such confessions
have represented. The fact that it behaves with such
resemblances quite different, one can recognise only in the
course of spiritual science. However, I do this indication
only.
I want to say as a prologue that spiritual
science has nothing to do with any traditions, but that it is
based on immediate research results that one can attain without
any tradition. From another side one misunderstands spiritual
science in as much as one regards it as a kind of new
confession, as a kind of sectarian religion. However, it is
just as little a confession like any other science of the
present. Just as little as one is allowed to say of the
chemists that they are a sect of chemistry, one can call
spiritual science a sectarian religion. However, the opposition
against spiritual science comes from quite different
requirements. The different denominations believe that they
have to fear any new denomination that it endangers the
religious life generally. One will convince himself gradually
that the same applies to this spiritual science as it applied
to the natural sciences when they began their modern
development in the age of Copernicus.
As one believed at that time that the
Copernican worldview would endanger the religious life of
humanity, as the different confessions exiled Copernicanism for
centuries, which may also apply to spiritual science that has a
similar task concerning the spirit as Copernicus had a
particular task in natural sciences. In the end, one will
realise that a similar relation exists between spiritual
science and the religious science, like between Copernicanism
and religious confessions. One will also realise that one
cannot achieve anything against that what culture demands just
as little in the fields of the spirit as one was able to do so
in the fields of scientific knowledge. I want only to touch
these matters at first and then expand on them in the course of
the talks.
However, another weighty objection
comes from the side that should consider spiritual science as a
kind of continuation of its own attempts, which believes to
stand on the firm ground of scientific research and thinking. I
want today to draw your attention only figuratively to the
relation of the modern spiritual science to the current of
scientific knowledge. Nobody can acknowledge the high value and
great cultural power of the modern scientific way of thinking
more than just someone who stands on the ground of spiritual
science. Who could let a spiritual current flow in the
civilisation that would oppose the scientific thinking? Such a
man would not understand how deeply not only in the contents,
but also in the whole way of the questions and riddles of
knowledge the natural sciences have intervened. I will indeed
argue nothing against the entitled demands of science in the
course of these talks. Humanity saw this science emerging, saw
it entering in our technology, in our traffic, it saw it
transforming the outer material world civilisation and
conquering the social life of the nations.
However, just because the modern spiritual
science understands that, it draws the knowledge from that
which natural sciences can perform. If natural sciences are
grasped vividly, not abstractly, not theoretically or
dogmatically, something can result from natural sciences and
their habitual ways of thinking that informs the human soul not
only about the outer laws of the sensory world but also about
the soul life. This encloses the questions of death and
immortality and the whole extent of spiritual life. Since I
want to emphasise this from the start that spiritual science
(German: Geisteswissenschaft)
is meant here not as a summary of various cultural sciences for
which today one also often uses the name
“Geisteswissenschaften” (humanities) — for history,
sociology, art history, legal history and the like. However,
that spiritual science is meant as knowledge of a real
spiritual life which is as truthful as the physical life round
us, and to which the human being belongs with his mind and
soul.
However, with it one stands straight away
on a field where many spirits of the modern time cannot yet go
along because for them the whole way how this spiritual science
approaches the spirit and the riddles of life is something
quite fantastic and dreamy as basically also the Copernican
world view was fantastic and dreamy to the contemporaries.
Nevertheless, natural sciences and spiritual science relate to
each other possibly in the following way: if a farmer harvests
his fruits in the autumn, the biggest part of these fruits is
used as human food.
However, a part of these fruits must
be sowed again if life should go on. Thus, the biggest part of
that what natural sciences have performed as great achievements
is determined to go over to the technical, the social, and the
traffic life, it is determined to fertilise the material
civilisation and to develop the progress of humanity. But in it
something is also included that can be handed over again to the
human soul without going over to the material life that can be
processed in this human soul in the way as I suggest it
immediately later, and that appears then in the soul like the
seminal grain that has been put in the earth. What the human
soul can take up that way is transformed in it and becomes that
clairvoyant force — far from any superstition —
which can glance at the spiritual world. Since this
distinguishes spiritual science from other branches of
knowledge: the fact that it requires a development of the human
soul beyond the viewpoint which counts, otherwise, in the
modern scientificity. In this scientificity one takes the human
being in such a way as he observes the world around us and the
principles of nature — equipped with his power of
cognition, with the sensory observation and his intellectuality
— and forms science that way. One takes, I say, the human
being as he is, and the human being takes himself, as he is to
penetrate into this scientificity.
This does not apply to spiritual science.
The spiritual world is for the human being a concealed world at
first, it does not exist for the senses and the usual reason.
It lies behind the world of the senses, although that what the
human being is in his deepest nature belongs to this
supersensible world. The human being with his power of
cognition if he understands himself in such a way, as he is,
belongs to this sensory world and this world of reason. In the
deeper sense, he belongs to the spiritual world; but he must
develop this deeper sense first. To put it another way: as true
it is that the human being takes himself for the usual science
as he is, it is also true that he only must transform himself
for spiritual science, for the knowledge of the spirit, so that
he can penetrate into the spiritual world. One has to develop
the cognitive forces for the spiritual world only; the human
being must transform himself only, so that the slumbering
cognitive faculties awake in him. However, these slumbering
cognitive faculties are in him, and he can wake them. However,
this is a viewpoint which is rather comfortable, but is
incomprehensible in many a respect for the present. Since this
present is inclined so much if it concerns questions of higher
life to put the question first: what can the human being
recognise? —
And then some people who live in the
habitual ways of thinking of the present rightly say: the human
cognitive faculties are limited and he cannot penetrate into a
spiritual world. On one side, there are many people saying that
there may be such a spiritual world, but the human cognitive
faculties are not able to penetrate into it. Others are more
radical and say that a spiritual world appears to nobody,
consequently, there is none. This is the view of materialism or
as one calls it nobler today, of monism.
One cannot argue about that at all that the
human being, as well as he is, cannot penetrate into the
spiritual world if he wants to grasp it scientifically if he
does not only want to believe in it. However, such a mere belief is no longer sufficient for
humanity today —
and will be less and less adequate for it,
because the scientific education has taken place during the
last centuries. However, one has to develop the
conditions by which the human being can penetrate into the
spiritual world.
One normally imagines if one assumes that
such a thing is possible that particularly abnormal forces are
necessary. These must be forces that are caused by abnormal
conditions. This is a misunderstanding, too. What it concerns
is that the knowledge, those soul forces by which the human
being penetrates into the spiritual world exist in the human
soul that they control the soul in our usual life. However,
they are subconscious in our everyday life, they control
subordinated fields of life, or if they control more important
fields, they control them in such a way that one does not
notice these forces and their influence. What always exists in
the soul what is absent in no soul what exists, however, in the
everyday life only to a minor degree must give
— developed to a certain height and strength
— cognitive forces for spiritual science. I want to draw
your attention to a soul quality — because I want to
talk not abstractly, but immediately concretely
— to a
quality that everybody knows that plays a role that gives,
however, a basic strength for spiritual science, brought only
from its low level to a certain intensity. Every human being
knows what one calls directing the attention of the soul to
something.
We must turn our attention, our interest to
the most various objects; since we need to make mental pictures
of these most various objects that remain in our memory and
influence our soul perpetually. Which role attention or
interest play in the human life, someone will notice who has
already reflected once about the good or bad memory. He knows
that a good memory is a result of the possibility in many a
respect to turn his attention to the things, to pursue them
with interest. Something that we are intensively attentive to,
something that we were involved with our full interest imprints
itself in our soul; this you keep in your soul life. Who passes
the things briefly has to complain of a bad memory. Still in
other respect attention, interest is important in this human
life. Since the inner integrity of our soul life depends on the
fact that we keep the things as mental pictures with which we
were once connected. Everybody knows that it is necessary for
the healthy soul life that the human being keeps the coherence
between the present and the experiences. Someone who would not
know in a great measure how his self-consciousness, his ego has
behaved during the past years, so that he, looking back, would
not recognise that he has experienced it, for someone to whom
the ego would always be a new experience would have no healthy
soul life. In the end, our healthy soul life goes back to the
fact that we are able to turn our attention to the things of
life. This basic soul force plays a role in life that is always
there.
Somebody could say now: hence, you tell to
us reporting about spiritual science something
every day and
you assert that this attention must be further developed.
Nevertheless, it is in such a way! This attention may be weak
in life, may be weak compared with the intensity that it
assumes with the spiritual researcher. Since the increase of
attention is something that the spiritual researcher must
practice over and over again that he must bring to such an
intensity compared with which the level of attention is low in
the usual life. One could say that it could be apparently easy
to reach the ground of the spiritual-scientific research
because it only concerns the development of something that
always exists in the usual life. However, the words in
Goethe's Faust
(verse 4928) also apply: “it's easy, to be sure, but easy
tasks take effort.” Many years' exercises spent in
perseverance of the soul are necessary to develop the soul
strength, and we call this increased life in attention
concentration of the spiritual life in spiritual science. We
call it concentration of the spiritual life because the human
mind or the human soul, as well as they are, spread out their
forces in the everyday life about a wide area, about an area
that embraces everything that the outer sensory world offers
and that the reason forms in this outer sensory perception. In
the usual life, the soul forces spread about everything that
the human being wants; briefly, the soul life is diffuse at
first.
What the spiritual researcher has to form
as the spiritual-scientific apparatus he must prepare to
himself in the spiritual area as the chemist prepares his
apparatuses in the laboratory. It is necessary to collect these
soul forces, otherwise dispersed, in one point as it were, to
turn the attention to one point. To which point? To a
self-chosen point in the inner experience of the soul. That
means that: the spiritual researcher has to form any mental
picture, any soul impulse, and to put it in the centre of his
soul life. A mental picture that has to do nothing with any
outside world at first is the best: an image, a
symbol.
I take a simple example: if we take a
sentence, which has no outer truth at first, but it does not
depend on that: I imagine light — light of a star,
light of the sun —
touching me. This light is wisdom flowing
through the world. A symbol. Now I concentrate my complete
attention to this symbol. Not that is the point that something
true is in it, but that all soul forces are concentrated in
this one point. Hence, it is necessary that you choose that as
preparation what you can read in the book How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds? where the different
methods are given. Here I want only to point to the principle.
It is necessary for it that you develop the strong will to
concentrate your whole soul life onto this one point. That
means, however, that you are able to cause artificially what
happens, otherwise, in sleep naturally. In sleep our senses
grow tired; the world stops being sense-perceptible for us.
Colours, tones, and smells stop making impressions on us.
However, besides, at the same time our consciousness dwindles
there. With the spiritual researcher, it must be just the
consciousness that quietens all outer impressions arbitrarily,
and, nevertheless, you have to keep it completely at the same
time.
In the same way, one has to stop what
immediately stops after falling asleep: all intentions must
become completely quiet. Everything that, otherwise, the human
being spends to stand vigorously in the world must become
completely quiet for the spiritual researcher. He must divert
his consciousness from everything that it is otherwise directed
to, and concentrate the whole soul only upon one point that he
has chosen himself. Then just those soul forces gain strength
that remain hidden, otherwise, in the everyday life, and now
something happens gradually that I would like to compare with
that what takes place in the area of the outer material life if
the chemist investigates, for example, the composition of
water. The spiritual researcher stands before the human being
in the world, as the chemist stands before the water. The human
being is for the spiritual researcher an intimate compound of
mind and soul with the bodily as for the chemist the water is a
compound of oxygen and hydrogen. Just as little the chemist
could get the idea what the water is if he investigated the
hydrogen only, just as little one can get an idea what the
human being is in his mind or soul if one looks at the physical
human life only. In this field the spiritual researcher must be
frightened just as little to be considered as a dualist as the
chemist may be frightened in his field, if he separates water
in hydrogen and oxygen. One is not more right to call the
spiritual researcher a dualist because he practices
“spiritual chemistry” in his field than the
chemist, because he does not accept that the water is a unity
but consists of hydrogen and oxygen, and that he must separate
the hydrogen from the oxygen to get to know the nature of
water.
The spiritual researcher works with the
same means, only in his fields. What I have just indicated: the
concentration, the increased attention wakes the forces
slumbering in the human soul during the everyday life, but by
which soul and spirit, which are, otherwise, in unseparated
connection with the physical-bodily, are separated from this
bodily as the material hydrogen is separated from the water
with the chemical experiment. The spiritual researcher
experiences this if he exercises this increase of attention
vigorously, often for many years. It is fact for him that the
mental-spiritual that one can easily doubt, otherwise, becomes
an immediate experience. Therefore, he can say because of
immediate experience, I experience myself independent of my
body in the spiritual-mental; now I know only what the
spiritual-mental is because I experience myself in the
spiritual-mental! —
It does not concern so much that the
spiritual researcher would have to add knowledge of the same
kind, as the scientific ones. However,, although his way of
research is completely in accordance with the scientific
spirit, his research method is, nevertheless, quite different;
and just because it wants to remain loyal to the scientific
laws, it must take on a form different from the scientific
methods which are immediately directed to the material
field.
Thus, the spiritual researcher attains a
consciousness of the following. In our present one will ask
with a certain right: have natural sciences delivered even if
not proofs, but the hypothetical authorisation of the view at
least that the human thinking is a function or a result of the
brain? Here in this point everything starts mostly that
opponents of natural sciences or followers of spiritual science
bring forward in a not quite modern sense, namely not in the
sense that is meant here as the modern one. Many people say who
would like to acknowledge the spirit and, hence, oppose such
statements from the start: the human thinking is bound to the
central nervous system; it is an outflow of the central nervous
system. One polemicizes
a lot against that what natural sciences
have not proved, indeed, but have put up as a hypothesis that
the human thinking is a function of the brain.
Many people immediately consider spiritual
science as threatened if one admits that the human thinking is
bound to the brain that one cannot think without the central
nervous system. In this point spiritual science has not even to
contradict the justified requirements of natural sciences;
since it is true that thinking, as we develop it in the usual
life, is bound to the central nervous system and to the
remaining nervous system. However, true spiritual science
teaches us to recognise that that form of the brain, of the
central nervous system that is necessary for thinking in the
everyday life has flowed out of the spirit that the spirit
builds up our body only in such a way that this body can become
the tool of thinking. Spiritual science does not descend only
in the thinking, it does not assert that thinking, as it
appears in the everyday life, is everlasting and immortal, but
it teaches us to recognise that our spirit and soul build up
our mental apparatus, that what is behind our mental apparatus
what generally lives behind our physical nature. The
spiritual-scientific methods, as I have suggested them, lead to
these active, creative forces that stand behind all
material.
Thus, the spiritual-scientific method
advances, because it must be in the inside at the same time
what it separates from the body, to another way of experience
and to a soul condition different from the way of the
experience and the mental condition of the usual life and the
usual science. I would like to emphasise one thing from the
start because I want to speak about concrete facts. What
expresses itself, otherwise, in our thinking and imagining, and
what is bound to the brain in the everyday life really
separates from the bodily by concentration as I have indicated.
The spiritual researcher experiences that he is strengthened
that he is beyond his central nervous system and that he faces
the own corporeality in this mental-spiritual experience. In
other words, as you experience yourself in the usual life
within your body, you experience yourself beyond your body if
you apply the spiritual-scientific methods to yourself. You
experience yourself beyond your brain if you apply these
methods of concentration. You know only then how the cerebral
tools are. Since I tell no fairy tales but something that the
spiritual researcher experiences. He feels like in the vicinity
of his brain. He knows what it means to think not in such a way
as one thinks in the usual life, but to think only in the
spiritual-mental element and to feel the brain beyond this
element — nay, to feel it even like something that offers
resistance against which one stumbles as one stumbles against
an outer object. I have described this increase of such
experiences to a more ample experience already here once; I
have also described it in my little writing A Way to Human Self-knowledge.
If the spiritual researcher continues his
exercises and has the devotion to concentrate his whole soul
life not upon one picture, but upon hundreds and hundreds of
pictures, so that the forces increase more and more, then that
experience takes place that I have called a stupefying event in
the just mentioned writing. It takes place for the one in one
form, for the other in another form; however, it has always
something typical. It will appear to everybody as I describe
it. The human being can advance so far, even in the middle of
the everyday life if he has done exercises for a long time that
he says to himself: what wants to reveal itself to you from the
everyday imagination? —
It is something that wants to penetrate you
like something that ascends, otherwise, only from your own
soul. However, it can also penetrate as for example a dream if
you awake from sleep what is, however, again endlessly more
than a dream about which you say to yourself: what happens
now? — Something happens that appears possibly like a
lightning striking in the space that you feel penetrating
yourself. You can say to yourself, it is, as if your body drops
from you and is destroyed. Now you know: you can be in yourself
inside without being in your body!
Then you know if you experience for the
first time what the spiritual researchers have meant who said:
someone who experiences the everlasting in the human being, the
mental-spiritual must approach the gate of death. You
experience the death in yourself pictorially. You experience in
the real, not imagined Imagination what it means: the
mental-spiritual separates from the body and continues existing
if it separates when the human being goes through the gate of
death. We still speak about that; today I want to indicate like
in a preface only the nature of the spiritual life and the
spiritual science connected with it.
A sum of inner experiences appears that
bring to mind at first what it means to do “spiritual
chemistry,” to “separate the mental-spiritual from
the bodily,” to investigate the destinies of the
mental-spiritual and to know that there is a real separation of
the spiritual from the bodily and an independent life of the
spirit compared with the body.
This is the fruit of the increased
attention, the increased concentration. You already notice this
on relatively elementary stages, this standing beyond the body,
in particular concerning the central nervous system. If you
feel thinking and imagining attracted by the spiritual world
beyond your brain, beyond your body, you are urged repeatedly
because you stand as an earthly human being in the usual life
to return to the usual imagination and to think as you just
think in the normal life. However, you experience the moment
when you must say to yourself: now you were beyond your body.
You must return in your body and you have to form what you have
experienced beyond the body in such a way that you let your
brain be grasped by the fact that the thoughts that you have
had beyond the body become cerebral thoughts!
This experience of entering the brain is
connected with something that must be well prepared that can be
well prepared if you have gone through the exercises which are
described in the book How Does
One Attain Knowledge of the Higher
Worlds?. Then you know, while
you immerse yourself with your thinking in the brain that the
brain offers resistance, and that, indeed, the process of
thinking in the usual life is a destruction of the central
nervous system that sleep, however, repairs. However, if you
advance in spiritual practising, you experience yourself
immersing in a process of disintegration; and this expresses
itself — if you have not developed the right feelings during the
preparation —
in the fact that you are frightened to
submerge again in the organism. The human being stands now
beyond his earthly body. He feels submerged in an abyss. Hence,
you must do such exercises that give you serenity for that
which may appear, otherwise, as fear. A certain soul condition
expresses itself in that power of cognition, in those research
methods for the higher worlds.
One has to add something else if real
revelation shall come from the spiritual worlds into the human
soul. You have to increase another quality up to the highest
intensity: devotion, love of that what meets you. You need this
devotion up to a certain degree in the usual life. However, you
have to increase this devotion so far that the human being
learns to renounce completely down to his deepest organism, to
suppress any activity. Practice gradually increased suppresses
the voluntary movements that come from the egoity of the human
being and causes that you are completely given away to the
current of existence, so to speak. Not only this has to occur,
but you have also to feel involuntary movements as something
external up to a certain degree. Up to the vascular organs, the
human being learns to feel himself with these exercises. Then
he can say about the spiritual world: you experience it beyond
your body; you experience it as a structured world in which
beings appear as in nature physical beings appear. By
concentration and meditation, that is by an increased devotion,
the human being finds the way into the spiritual world as he
finds the way into nature if he looks at it with the outer eyes
and with his reason. However, if the human being has separated
the mental-spiritual from the bodily by a process of spiritual
chemistry, he grasps himself also in his infinity; then he
grasps himself in the existence that lies beyond birth or
conception and death.
Then he recognises himself in this
everlasting being in such a way that he grasps that idea of
development about which I still speak in these talks. This idea
corresponds in the area of the human spiritual life to that
theory of evolution to which natural sciences owe so much in
their fields. Then the human being grasps the idea of the
repeated lives on earth, the fact that the complete human life
consists of repeated earth-lives between which lives are in
wholly spiritual worlds. The idea of reincarnation
distinguishes the life in the body between birth and death and
the life between death and new birth in a wholly spiritual
existence.
Those who believe to stand firmly in the
scientific habitual ways of thinking very easily regard all
these matters as daydreams and fantasies. One shows by the
researches about dream, hypnosis, suggestion, autosuggestion
and so on how from the depths of the subconscious soul life a
number of things can appear that can cause a deceptive
consciousness in the human being. You experience something that
has significance beyond your bodily life. All these things are
theoretical objections. Someone who penetrates deeper into
spiritual science will no longer do them. Since we will make
many objections in the course of these talks and will show how
spiritual science has to position itself to them. I would like
to draw your attention to something fundamental
only.
One can easily say the following. If the
spiritual researcher has experienced his spiritual-mental in
its independence and believes then to look back as in an
enlarged memory at former lives on earth or at his last life on
earth. This is nothing else than his transformed wishes that
exist in the subconscious and shine from below into the day
consciousness whereby he abandons himself to delusions,
hallucinations and so on.
It is comprehensible that the uneducated
thinking speaks in such a case about self-formed wishes,
illusions, and hallucinations and so on; but one does not know
what it concerns. Someone who has separated his
spiritual-mental life from the bodily by spiritual chemistry
notices if he really experiences such a retrospect into a
former life on earth that it is not a transformed wish or
something that can appear from his sub-consciousness. Since one
may say, what one experiences in the spiritual is usually very
different from that what one would have dreamt. You can find a
lot of nonsense in the field of spiritual science. In no other
field charlatanism is so widespread as in the field of
spiritual science; and one can hear someone speaking who has
looked at spiritual science who has absorbed some of its
teachings and is convinced that these teachings are true: this
or that human being has experienced this or that in a former
life. Now, one can experience a lot of nonsense in this field.
Normally one can notice that the statements that are done in
this field correspond to certain human wishes. Since what the
people want to have been, this takes on mysterious shapes
sometimes. Mostly these incarnations are rather famous,
excellent persons whom one can get to know not by
spiritual-scientific research but by history! However, to
someone who penetrates into the spiritual worlds really the
things are represented quite different. Hence, the following
example: somebody casts a glance, after he has applied the
spiritual-scientific methods to his soul, at a former life on
earth, as it is possible and even natural if the
spiritual-scientific methods have become effective up to a
certain degree; then the picture of experiences of a former
life on earth appear.
However, one will notice that these
experiences are in such a way that one has no use for them at
the present moment when one sees them in the enlarged
retrospect; except that they enrich the knowledge one has no
use for them in the usual life. One realises that one had
certain skills, certain knowledge and so on in a former life.
Now they appear pictorially. However, one is too old in the
present life to attain these skills and knowledge again. As a
rule this will happen what one would not have dreamt what no
imagination can invent; as a rule the real life is completely
different from the fantastic picture which one imagines about a
former life on earth. It can also be that one notices: in the
past life, you had a relationship to this or that person.
However, if one wants to draw the conclusions in the age when
one discovers this for the present life, the living conditions
do not permit it, and then one is urged to this what one calls
the spiritual principle of causality. One recognises,
— but one
cannot apply the knowledge to the present life. You must also
develop a devoted soul life and say to yourself, what you have
developed once as relation to persons will enjoy life; but you
must wait, until the spiritual connections bring the causes of
former lives on earth to effect in the present one. What one
wants to dream in spiritual field does not happen if the
knowledge is a real one.
If you look at that existence which passes
between death and a new birth where you are in a wholly
spiritual life, any conceptual thinking does not help to get
mental pictures of your life in that time. What you have to
consider as the next form of your life-tasks, of your interests
at first of which kind your surroundings are in which you have
grown up in the outer material world what you have developed as
wishes, desires, and emotions which character your mindscape
has, all this is mostly completely contrary to that what you
have experienced in the spiritual world before you have
descended to the present embodiment. What you have desired
there does not correspond to the wishes in the earthly
life.
We take an example. In the earth-life, you
can be affected very easily by a stroke of fate painfully. Then
you may easily believe if you feel anything as painful and if
this painful feeling does not correspond to any wish, not even
in the sub-consciousness, that in the spiritual world where you
were before your whole life of desires, your position to the
spiritual world was similar as now your position is towards
life. However, this is not the case. The feeling in the
spiritual world before your embodiment is drastically
different.
Hence, you have to imagine that you
yourself caused everything to experience this pain. What you do
not want in the life on earth you get to know that you have
wished it before your life on earth. Since you can attain
perfection of your soul life experiencing and overcoming this
pain. Since the fateful question becomes a question of
perfection by the spiritual-scientific knowledge.
If we imagine the spiritual life this way,
indeed, a spiritual environment appears to the increased inner
life as the natural environment appears to the senses and the
reason. The spiritual researcher has to overcome many things to
put as science what he can observe. Since you can imagine that
the experiences which the spiritual researcher must have must
be attained first. They are attained in such a way that they
appear weak that the weakest memory pictures of the usual life
are strong compared to these manifestations of the spiritual
world, and that these pale recollections of the spiritual must
be strengthened. They are strengthened only gradually while one
settles down more and more in the spiritual conditions. This
strengthening of the soul life is the basic condition of the
spiritual research. Then, however, something else must be
added.
We see in the course of the talks that it
is unfounded to say, what is attained by concentration and
meditation this way does not differ at all from the illusions
and hallucinations of a morbid soul life. One may say if one
considers the matters externally that the experiences of the
spiritual researcher do not differ from them. One may even say,
if the spiritual researcher describes these matters, it is real
in such a way, as if a dreamer describes his dreams. In the
dreams, memories of the outer world express themselves. Hence,
one can say in a certain sense, what the spiritual researcher
separates as his mental-spiritual from the bodily and puts as
beings of an imagery before his soul is taken from the
qualities of the pictures of the beings of the outer
world.
Someone who reads my Occult Science. An Outline may say if he absolutely wants to do so: the matters
which you describe and which are to be attained only in the
supersensible worlds for spiritual science are matters that one
also finds in the outer world, even if not arranged that way.
One may say this in certain way, although the objections that
are raised today from some side against what spiritual science
says are somewhat naive. Somebody says, for example, what one
can read in such a writing as Occult Science is
arranged like by a kind of pressed inner experience, and it is
such a representation, actually, speculative fiction and no
reality. That just shows what kind of logic it is. Since if one
dwells on it, one notices that it is the same logic, as if a
child that has only seen a wooden lion up to now says if it
sees a real lion: this is no real lion, because the real one is
wooden. The opponents of spiritual science often do so. Because
they know the matters not properly, they accuse the spiritual
scientist that the matters are not in such a way, as they know
them from the usual life. Nevertheless, one can object that the
portrayals of the spiritual researcher's memories are from the
usual life. However, this objection is as valuable as for
example the objection of that child.
What one attains and beholds so directly
must not go over from the observation of the spiritual world to
the sensory world; but it is necessary that you learn to read
in that what you behold. Since that what you have beheld you
have to read correctly. However, you learn this reading with
the exercises at the same time by which you familiarise
yourself with the spiritual world. If anybody regards the
portrayals of spiritual science only as memories of the usual
world and says: these are only concepts if there is spoken
about former lives on earth, which are also found, otherwise,
in life only not arranged that way, then such a human being
resembles someone who looks at a letter and says to another: do
you want to experience anything new from it? I already know
everything that you can read in it; because there are only
letters in it which I already know, there is nothing new at
all! The same applies if one says: what the spiritual
researcher describes, nevertheless, is only memories of the
sensory world! But that is the point with these portrayals what
is behind as something essential that reveals itself
there.
Hence,
spiritual science is the result of the
spiritual researcher's experience. It is hard that spiritual
science complies so little with the life goals of today that
the spiritual researcher must always be involved with that what
becomes experience, observation for him that he does not put
his body on the market, as it were, but his soul if he speaks
about the conditions in the spiritual world. While the usual
world separates the human being if he should recognise
something “objective,” the spiritual-scientific
researcher must submerge in that which his science refers to,
must become one with it. However, one regards that as
“subjective” experience only. One does not notice
that the indicated methods make the mental-spiritual
independent of everything that we experience subjectively.
Since if we experience it ever so much, and if it is called
“mysticism” ever so much: what we experience
subjectively is experienced in the body. However, what the
spiritual researcher experiences is experienced beyond the
body, but can be understood in the body with the usual
reason.
Since also that objection is not justified
that someone who wants to get knowledge of the spiritual worlds
must be himself a spiritual researcher. In order to find and
investigate the spiritual facts and beings one must be a
spiritual researcher but not to understand the
spiritual-scientific communications. It is sufficient that one
absorbs them with common sense as one absorbs what the chemists
or physicists find with their methods.
If one considers spiritual research this
way, it appears as that which natural sciences must lead into
as it were. As natural sciences have shown material goals to
humanity, spiritual science will transform the mental-spiritual
experience of humanity in such a way, as it is commensurate to
the goals of the present and of the future of humanity. About
these goals, one may say what a man of the present said, namely
what Wilson (Woodrow W., 1856-1924, The New Freedom (1912)), the president of the United States of America, said
concerning something external that applies, however, to the
goals of spiritual science generally. Wilson speaks in the book
that recently appeared about the reforms that he has
experienced. He says that the outer material life has changed
completely that instead of the old patriarchal relation of
employers and employees quite different relations have taken
place. Trade unions of employees face the employers, and the
former conditions have changed completely.
The fact that it has happened that way is a
result of modern life; this is, above all, for someone who
realises the matter properly a result of the knowledge of
nature of the present humanity. Now Wilson says, what one has
as forms of the legitimate living together still often
corresponds to that what one considered as right in former
times when the single worker faced his employer in a
patriarchal relation. Wilson now demands that one creates
harmony between the legitimate living together of modern human
beings and that what civilisation has created. Many things
culminate in the exceptionally interesting literature of the
American president. What he says about external conditions one
can say about the complete mental human experience today. One
would like to mention thinkers — if one considers
such a thing in connection with the spiritual goals
— who
belonged to quite different times of human development:
Archimedes, the founder of mechanics, and Plato, the great
Greek philosopher. They were of the opinion that the
application of science to the technology of life weakens the
human mind. One can understand that excellent spirits of other
times had this opinion; but according to such opinions, the
course of the world complies just as little as with that what
one believes today, indeed, less what, however, people believed
when the first railway should be built in Germany. At that
time, the Bavarian Medical Board had to deliver an expertise
whether one should build railways or not. This board meant that
one should not build railways, because if one built them, the
nervous systems of persons who would drive in them would be
injured very much. However, if railways were still built, one
should build high wooden walls on the left and on the right at
least, so that the persons living nearby would not be injured
by the sight or noise of the trains.
One may smile at this medical board.
However, even if one smiles at it, one can find it still
reasonable. Since one can oppose or stand up for it even if the
Bavarian Medical Board very much exaggerated the issue,
nevertheless, it has become true for someone who knows history
not only externally, but internally what it had assumed. One
can say that this board had a good view. However, one does not
need to oppose it. Why not? Because history stands up for it!
It is indifferent what the single human beings may think about
the fact that the course of the global development goes on, and
that the human being has to adapt himself to the course of
development. This is also the demand that Wilson puts up: the
course of development has brought certain cultural processes,
and the human being has to adapt himself to them.
If one extends this to the soul conditions,
one can say that in that what the souls have received in the
course of time, the goals came about which are infinitely more
complex than those of the past times have been. For the outside
world, one can imagine this reversal easily; but also that life
has changed concerning the needs of the soul daily. Someone who
would believe that one could do this with the soul forces in
the same way even today that directed the human being into the
spiritual worlds once does not regard what takes place in the
world development. He does not regard that we have not only
four centuries of natural sciences behind ourselves, but what
is more important that we have four centuries of scientific
education behind ourselves, and that it has become necessary
today to bring the results of spiritual science to the hearts
and souls. Even if it may also correspond to the details that
the course of world history does not always permit this,
nevertheless, one must say:
If today anybody opposed anything against
that what spiritual science wants to be, then it could be that
he would resemble the Bavarian Medical Board that wanted to
erect wooden walls beside the railways, so that people living
nearby would not be injured: the course of world
development passes over him. However, the human being is must not
position himself to the goals of the global development in such
a way that he leaves it to its own devices, but he got the
strength to contribute to the conditions. However, that what
approaches the human soul as demands in the outer life and from
the outer life what appears as outer goals demands inner goals
of the soul. The inner goals of the soul are the goals of
spiritual science; natural sciences have changed the outer
worldview, the body of civilisation. However, civilisation needs a soul. This soul should be
the creation of spiritual science. It is the goal of spiritual
science to penetrate the body of civilisation with soul and
spirit. Then one can easily realise that the spiritual
researcher can calmly consider everything that spiritual
science experiences as contradiction and misunderstanding. The
living conditions demand such a kind of knowledge of the
spiritual world in which the soul feels so strong that it
attracts forces for its being not only from the sensory world
but from that what a knowledge of the spiritual world can give.
More and more one will recognise that the soul needs forces for
the modern life that flow not only from the knowledge of the
sensory existence, but also from the knowledge of the spiritual
existence. With these strong forces, the soul will penetrate
itself like with an elixir of life, will feel the sense of its
being exceeding birth and death, experiences that quality in
itself that one calls “immortality,” and will cope
with the tasks that the present and future of human history
must set to it.
I wanted to outline the present and future
of the human soul with some words only. I give all other
explanations in the following talks. In this preface, I wanted
to cause a feeling of that only what the spiritual researcher
bears in himself. To speak from the spiritual-scientific point
of view in such a way, as I like to do it in these talks, can
happen only on two conditions. What the spiritual researcher
has to inform of the real spiritual research differs at first
from that what one often thinks and considers as correct, so
that someone who asserts this spiritual-scientific is a
charlatan, a blatherer or a frivolous human being
— or that
he can know in himself that truth is what he has to say. There
may be the most different nuances of these two extremes; but
intermediate stages do almost not exist. With the consciousness
that one can be considered as the one or the other, one speaks
anyway as a spiritual researcher. Someone who stands in this
spiritual science can develop the consciousness and the
strength to speak about this spiritual research only because he
also knows how to estimate its power of cognition and its
strength of truth and that he can withstand the
misunderstandings and consciously wrong accusations because of
this consciousness of truth and knowledge on one side.
However, on the other side spiritual science also leads
into the immediate spiritual life, as well as into the
spiritual life of our time and teaches the spiritual researcher
that the representation of spiritual science is a necessity
now.
Even if the contemporaries do not clearly
express this necessity of spiritual knowledge, it exists as a
dark need of spiritual knowledge. In the depths of the souls,
one perceives the cry for spiritual knowledge, even if this cry
itself is not often audible to the conscious thinking of our
fellow men. Since our time needs the knowledge of the spirit.
All other science that is commensurate with our time would
lower this spirit, would extinguish it from the souls as it
also works from other currents of the spiritual life if
spiritual science does not stir up it. The spiritual researcher
knows that the human soul needs the spirit, and, hence, he
hopes that it will belong to the goals of human development in
the future to maintain this spirit.
We have realised that the human soul must
transform itself if it wants to attain the spirit. From that,
it is evident that it is more comfortable to leave the spirit
where it is and not to care for it, than to enterprise in the
soul what leads to the spirit. It is more comfortable, however,
also with that what arises to common sense and to a healthy
feeling of truth to realise the material connections of nature
simply, than to develop a sharper reason and to use it to
realise what spiritual science says. One lives more comfortable
without spirit. Nevertheless, the spirit has the quality that
it brings damage if one wants to live without it as it brings
benefit if one wants to live with it. If one wants to live with
it, it animates the soul; it penetrates it with all skills that
we want for life. If one denies it, it withdraws and kills the
soul life to the same degree, as this does not want to know
anything of it. If one denies it, it takes much optimism
gradually and gives desperation and timidity.
Indeed, one can deny the spirit; however,
one cannot destroy it. If one denies it, it appears in its
counter-image inside the soul — and asks in the
human soul for itself. The spiritual researcher who speaks of
spiritual science as a goal of the present feels this.
Therefore, he relies on it: it will settle down because
humanity can close the eyes before the spirit, but it cannot
prevent it. However, in the end this impact changes into the
demand to look at this spirit. I would like to express that in
the following way. One can deny the spirit, because it is more
comfortable to understand the world and to live in it without
spirit than with spirit. However, one cannot resist the demands
of spirit denying it. Hence, that what spiritual science wants
to incorporate as an elixir of life in the civilisation it
incorporated by its own strength. Since the human soul often
denies the spirit; however, it will demand it always out of its
innermost nature, out of its deepest goals!
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