I
The
Human Soul in the Supersensible Realm and Its Relationship to the Body
Basel, 18 October 1917
You
hear repeatedly if one talks about anthroposophy that it
originates from the fantastic inspirations of single
personalities. Many people at least judge that way who fancy
themselves as capable. However, one has to say from the start
that this anthroposophic spiritual knowledge wants to cover a
research field that contains the most important interests of
the human life generally. Hence, isolated attempts were done
repeatedly at all times to cultivate this field. But one must
say that these were mostly only light flashes in our time which
were cast on this field by this or that outstanding personality
who contemplated the human spiritual life. These light flashes
with which one always has the sensation that they come from
quite different origins of the human being than the knowledge
that refers to the outside sense perception.
Unsurprisingly, an unaware cognitive instinct makes the human
beings illuminate this field by such light flashes repeatedly,
because on this field there are the most important soul
riddles which the human being has to face over and over
again with his feeling, thinking and willing. The human being
has to feel: if he does not take a position to these questions,
it has an effect on his soul that you can compare with a kind
of bodily illness. The soul life becomes banal; it feels
exposed to all kinds of “addictions” — I
would like to say — if the doubts, the uncertainties
emerge concerning these questions. However, in our times the
human beings were less eager to satisfy their desire for
knowledge, which arises from such impulses, with spiritual
food. Who did not know the fashion of those who could afford it
to visit the most different sanitariums where, actually, for
many people nothing was extinguished but that desire for
knowledge of which one liked, actually, to be unaware in the
usual life. What the human beings searched in sanitariums and
similar institutions, were, strictly speaking, only suggestions
with which they did not want to be present, so to speak, with
their souls and which should meet those mysterious desires
about which I have just spoken and which one does not want to
satisfy spiritually.
A
picture repeatedly emerges to me if I have to contemplate such
questions. When I was — to visit somebody — in a
sanitarium just at a time when the different guests were
passing and when I found out for myself after the conversation
and the sight of single patients that that who mostly needed
recovery of his nervous system was the doctor in charge. The
others needed much less recovery of their nervous systems than
the doctor in charge needed.
On
this field, single persons who dealt more intensely with
questions of the spiritual life have cast single light flashes
that arose to them from the depths of their souls. Besides, one
thing always became known that would run like a red thread also
today through the considerations of this evening. The fact that
in the human being, as he walks on earth today, another human
being sleeps and rests who is not perceived due to the
conditions of the usual life because he sleeps quieter in the
usual human being than dream images exist in him which emerge
and disappear.
However, one thing always struck just spirited persons when
they found out for themselves how this second human being rests
in the usual human being: they could not conceive this sleeping
human being without bringing him together with death in any
way. More or less instinctively, the one or the other
personality recognised that just as the phenomena of the outer
sense perceptible physical life are associated with the laws of
existence, of growth, of birth and so on, this second human
being sleeping in the first is associated intimately with
death, with fading. You notice that it is a great, important
moment for persons of knowledge if they have to think the
higher human being in the usual human being associated with the
forces of death.
Such a personality is the philosopher and psychologist Karl
Fortlage (1806-1881). I want to take an important statement as
starting point that he did in a course of eight psychological
lectures in 1869. In these lectures, you can find the
following, quite important place:
“If we call ourselves living beings and attribute a
quality to ourselves which we have in common with animals and
plants, we inevitably understand by the living state something
that never leaves us and always continues in sleep and in the
wake state in us. This is the vegetative life of nourishing our
organism, an unaware life, a sleeping life; it is outbalanced
in the breaks of waking by the life of consumption. The brain
makes an exception here because this life of nourishing, this
sleeping life, is outbalanced in the breaks of the waking by
the life of consumption. In these breaks the brain is exposed
to prevailing consumption and gets consequently into a state
which would bring about the absolute weakening of the body or
death, if it extended to the other organs.”
After Fortlage has come to this strange statement, he continues
this consideration with the following, profound words:
“Consciousness is a little and partial death, death is a
big and complete consciousness, an awakening of the whole being
in its innermost depths.”
You
realise that such a light flash, emerging from the depths of
the soul, illuminates the coherence of death and consciousness
what accompanies us during our wake life always and makes up,
actually, the human being. Fortlage gets to an idea of the
relationship of death and consciousness, realising that that
which seizes all human beings at once at the moment of death
works in microcosm if we unfold our consciousness during the
wake life. Every conscious act is in microcosm the same as
death is on a large scale. So that — as to Fortlage
— the real death if it occurs is the emergence of an
enclosing consciousness, which puts the human being into a
supersensible world, while he is put into the physical world if
his soul needs the physical body between birth and death.
Fortlage wrote many volumes on psychology. However, such
light flashes appear only now and again in his writings. The
remaining contents of his writings even deal with that which
one finds so normally today in psychology: the association and
course of mental pictures, the emergence of desires and so on,
briefly, with all those questions on which one ventures solely
in psychology and which are far away from that what, actually,
interests the whole human being in psychology, which are far
away from the main questions of freedom and immortality.
The
considerations of this evening deal with the question of
immortality while in some weeks here I hold a talk about
freedom from the same viewpoint.
Even if Fortlage is concerned with the subordinate questions in
his vast psychological research, and in such a way that this
kind of activity cannot lead to the highest questions, at
least, such light flashes are found with him. However, one
reproved him for it. Eduard von Hartmann reproved Fortlage
sharply that he would have left the path of science introducing
such a coherence into the strict science as that of
consciousness and death.
Well, one may say, not only Fortlage but also many
personalities produced in single light flashes something of
knowledge that refers to this characterised second human being
sleeping in the sense-perceptible human being. However, these
were isolated light flashes.
Anthroposophy has the task now to systemise, to make methodical
that what has come up instinctively in single light flashes
like manifestations of higher knowledge from the depths of the
human soul, so that that which originates from it can place
itself as a fully valid science beside the modern natural
sciences. However, it is necessary that that who wants to form
an opinion about anthroposophy casts off some prejudices that
easily result from certain advantages of modern science.
I
had to say, the human being whom spiritual science considers is
something sleeping in the normally waking human being. From it,
however, it is explicable that everything that refers to this
second human being is generally drowned as it were at first in
our consciousness by the sensory experience and the needs of
our personal life. If in this usual life now and again such
light flashes appear, they disappear faster than a dream does.
No miracle, hence, that most people once say to themselves
after the absolutely entitled judgement of our time: indeed,
what emerges there from the soul and will manifest of this low
sounding sleeping human being, this does — if it appears
with those who call themselves spiritual researchers —
the impression of something dreamish, fantastic. Our time does
not want to get involved with such phantasms. It has rapidly
finished its judgement: nonsense, this is something that has
arisen from the imagination of single ones.
However, something else could be right. How would it be if it
were right that one could get such weak images as they exist in
dream of that what lives in the human being beyond birth and
death what is the everlasting of the human nature compared with
the transient? If this held true, one would have to renounce
either any knowledge of the everlasting in the human being if
one did not want to recourse to images of imagination or dream
life, or one would have to bring the logical discipline into
this world that usually seems to be fantastic, the sense of
methodical research that one applies to the sense-perceptible
world. One has to raise the images with certain soul forces, so
that they do not only scurry like dreams, but also become as
distinct and impressive as the images of the usual
consciousness are.
Is
anyone able to do this? Today it is difficult to bring home to
a human being that one is able to do it even in scientific
sense because today one regards natural sciences as the only
science that has a strictly reasonable methodology. If one
distinguishes other sciences, one accepts them, actually, only
as far as they are founded methodically after the pattern of
natural sciences. One has to say for certain fields: what
natural sciences have brought up in modern times as mental
pictures, showed that it must be that way if they want to
control the area which is assigned to them. However, one must
also say that one cannot approach the everlasting life of the
human being with these mental pictures.
These images cannot be appropriate to the same extent to solve
the riddles of nature and the riddles of the human soul. To the
latter one has to add something else. Which means must be
applied to make the soul so strong that it can bring up the
mental pictures which rest sleeping below in our consciousness
and can apply the strict discipline and methodology of thinking
to them, about which I have spoken in particular in my book
How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.
As in former talks, I want again to emphasise some viewpoints
of these writings. One gets no idea of the approach of the
spiritual researcher what he has to do, actually, to behold
into the spiritual world with his soul if one does not realise
what one can experience as a whole human being with the
suitable desire for knowledge at certain limiting points of
knowledge to which just the modern natural sciences lead.
Modern natural sciences give that who dedicates himself to them
not only explanations, which nobody admires more than the
spiritual researcher does, of the outer physical course, of
various things which have an impact on the practical life, but
natural sciences give that who dedicates himself from certain
viewpoints an inner education of the soul life. More than one
was able in former stadia of scientific cognition, today one is
prepared to spiritual research cognitively, actually, just by
natural sciences. One should not be restricted by that what
natural sciences have to say about the outside world in their
own field.
One
should rather be able to soar an inner discipline of the soul
life by the way one does research in nature. The mental
pictures that natural sciences deliver can explain the outer
nature only; after their contents, they have nothing to say
about the spiritual life. But while one applies them devotedly,
they educate that human being by the way who is able to take
care of that what goes forward in him, of certain inner living
conditions which bring along him to receive a concept, an inner
experience of that soul life beyond the body.
I
know very well that this concept — living with his soul
beyond the body — is for many people the summit of
nonsense today. However, this never minds. Everybody can
convince himself that the inner experience gives him the
certain insight of the life beyond the body if he goes through
such soul exercises as I have indicated them in my writings or
as I want to pronounce them, in principle, here.
One
can experience especially important things if one just arrives
at that boundary area of cognitive life to which natural
sciences lead so often. You know, many people speak of the big
boundary questions of cognition. One speaks of the fact that
the human soul comes to a border if it wants to know about
whether the world is infinite or limited spatially or
temporally, if the soul wants to know whether it is subject to
an irresistible constraint in all its actions or whether it is
free.
Indeed, these are the highest boundary questions. Du
Bois-Reymond put such boundary questions in his famous speech
about the limits of the knowledge of nature, about the seven
world riddles. You can experience the deepest impression if you
feel out of the pain of a person longing for knowledge how such
a person stands at such a boundary place.
I
could bring in many examples. Such an example is contained in
the writings of the famous aesthetician and philosopher
Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). If one reads his
writings, one has often to stop with that what he experiences
at such boundary places of cognition. He wrote a nice treatise
on a book that the philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1846-1930) had
written about the dream fantasies.
In
this treatise that reproached Vischer that he had mixed with
the spiritists, Vischer states such a place where he shows what
he had experienced at the boundary places of cognition. He
said, it is most certain that the human soul cannot be in the
body; however, it is also most certain that it is not beyond
the body. Here we have such a boundary question, which is
paradoxical, because it has an entire contradiction in itself,
as those are which one meets just always then when one delves
devotedly in strict natural sciences, in life generally. The
soul cannot be in the body; however, it can also not be beyond
the body! — Why does one get to such contradiction?
At
such border places where such contradictions appear, the
scientific cognition is not at all helpful and it is most
annoying if one believes that it helps something. Then,
however, most people are soon ready with their judgement. They
simply say in such a case, well, up to here just the human
knowledge reaches; we are not able to get further. —
However, it is not that way. Because Vischer had the prejudice,
he experienced the contradiction only. However, he did not
experience what one can do to get further with his soul at such
border places. Here the usual cognition must stop and a
particular experience of the soul has to begin. Here you must
be able to forget as it were what the images of the usual life
are because they lead you just to this border place only. You
must be able to experience this here. Here you must be able to
struggle with that what faces you if you let yourself in for
such a contradiction. One should experience such contradictions
with the whole soul. Then something new faces the soul like
from spiritual depths that it cannot experience without this
experience of such contradictions.
One
has formed mental pictures of how, for example, lower animals
that still have no senses develop senses in contact with the
outside world. An inner life existed; it is confronted with the
outer world, adapts itself to the outer world, and experiences
the impulses of the outer world. While before the life pulsates
in the organism and then everywhere stumbles against the
sensory outside, it develops, we say, a sense of touch. First,
it is a kind of internal tunnelling, then bumping against the
borders of the externally spatial. Nevertheless, the being
learns in the contact with the outside world to adapt itself;
it forms a kind of picture of the outside world by the sense of
touch; by the collisions with the border, this sense of touch
develops.
One
can compare to this image of that what develops the outer
senses in the lower organisms what the soul experiences if it
gets to such border places of cognition. There the soul really
experiences in such a way, as if you bump against anything in
the darkness that you have outside at first. Then that
differentiates itself, which you experience there in such
contradictory mental pictures that one forms at boundary places
of knowledge. As the sense of touch arises as a physical sense
from the undifferentiated cells, a spiritual existence arises
from the mental, while the soul bumps against the border of the
spiritual world. You really bump against the spiritual world.
However, you also adapt yourself to it. You experience the
significant that you have the soul first as it were as an
undeveloped soul organism, which the outside spiritual world
faces, then however, this soul develops spiritual senses of
touch and spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in the further process
to perceive that with which it is confronted at first.
I
gladly believe that today those people who feel the urge to
experience something of the spiritual world would prefer if one
could teach the ability of perceiving the spiritual world while
one imposes them mystically or as the case may be. Some people
believe this. Nevertheless, it is not that way. What opens the
spiritual world to us is inner soul work. This inner soul work
really leads to that which I have indicated. The human being
who changes his soul into an organised soul knows that his soul
gets free from the body, when pushing against the spiritual and
perceives the spirit. Getting free from the body is a result of
inner perception. Since also that which I have explained just
now appears repeatedly with persons of knowledge.
It
is strange, how the course develops which I have described
spiritual-scientifically with those who have worked through the
longings for knowledge.
Let
me bring in an example of Vischer once again, the example of a
quotation by him by which he shows how he felt placed
repeatedly at those boundary places of cognition where one
cannot help perceiving contradictions, but contradictions that
cannot be solved while you solve them logically, but while you
settle down into them and develop your spiritual organs.
In
particular, the following contradiction appeared to Vischer
over and over again: the brain should be the organ of the soul,
should produce mental pictures as it were; but if one becomes
engrossed in the being of the mental pictures, one cannot
regard them as cerebral products. This is such a boundary place
of cognition; Vischer says referring to it:
“No mind, where no nerve centre, where no brain, the
opponents say.” — Vischer himself does not say it
— “No nerve centre, no brain, we say if it were not
prepared from below on countless levels. It is simple to jibe
at a spirit rumbling about in granite and lime — it is
not more difficult than if we ask mockingly how the proteins in
the brain soar ideas. The human knowledge cannot measure the
level differences. It will remain a secret how it appears and
happens that nature behind which the spirit still must slumber
is such perfect counterblow of the spirit that we get bumps
from it. It is a diremption of such apparent totality that with
Hegel's alterity and exasperation, as witty as the formula may
be, nothing is said; the asperity of the imaginary partition is
simply covered. One finds the right recognition of the cutting
edge and the thrust of this counterblow with Fichte, but no
explanation of it.”
This portrayal is very strange. Friedrich Theodor Vischer feels
facing a limit of knowledge; he describes his experience. How
has he to describe it?
He
gets to the expression: “we get bumps from it.” He
gets to the expression: “cutting edge and thrust of the
counterblow.” — One sees the soul that wants to
differentiate to develop internal spiritual organs by which it
can experience the supersensible outside world, in which it
lives.
For
a long time in the history of humanity, it was an obstacle to
soar spiritual organs in the right way because one believed
only the human thinking that takes the sense impressions as
starting point could solve certain questions, just the
questions of God, freedom and immortality.
Well, thinking is important, because strictly speaking a big
part of those exercises that one must do to attain spiritual
organs consists of a higher development of thinking than the
thinking is which one uses in natural sciences. However, if you
only abandon yourself to the usual thinking, that originates
from the usual human being not from that second human being
sleeping in you. This thinking does not lead into the spiritual
world; this thinking can only realise that it is in the
spiritual world. However, no unbiased person concedes that
thoughts are something that lives in the sensory world;
however, these thoughts contain nothing but impressions of the
sensory world if they are taken from the usual human nature.
People with deeper inner life have always felt like in flashes
of inspiration where to the human thinking leads if it is left
to itself, emancipated from the outer sense perception.
You
can find — if you have experience of the
spiritual-scientific literature — such light flashes with
numerous personalities which sometimes are, however, darkness
flashes. With them, one has to stop and observe to which cliffs
the human cognitive life leads if this life is sincere and
honest to itself and does not fool itself with all kinds of
prejudices, and does not apply all kinds of methods taken from
other, verified fields to the soul life itself. Again an
example of many:
A
man who really struggled with knowledge problems and riddles is
Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) who taught philosophy at the
University of Münster until few years. Gideon Spicker took
the education for the spiritual as starting point. The deepest
knowledge questions arose to him from theology. Some years ago,
he wrote two nice booklets: From the Cloister to the
Academic Lectureship. Destinies of a Former Capuchin (1908)
and In the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. A
Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (1910); in
the one he describes his life, in the other his knowledge
desire.
At
a place, one has to pause particularly where this former
Capuchin, who then became a professor, expresses himself about
the experience that he had with thinking that he had
emancipated from the sensory experience. However, he did not
have the courage to go into spiritual science; he did not
develop the power of thoughts so far that it wakes the
spiritual organs, so that he faced a spiritual world, felt with
his soul being in the realm of the supersensible. Because he
was at such a border place where he experienced something with
the thinking, he expressed himself as follows:
“To which philosophy one confesses, whether to a dogmatic
or skeptical, to an empiric or transcendental, a critical or
eclectic one: all without exception take an unproven and
unprovable proposition as starting point, namely the necessity
of thinking. No investigation gets to this necessity, as
deeply as it may prospect one day. It must be absolutely
accepted and can be founded by nothing” — he means
the necessity of thinking — “every attempt to prove
its correctness always requires it. Beneath it a bottomless
abyss yawns, a nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of
light. We do not know, where from it comes, neither where to it
leads. Whether a merciful God or a bad demon put it in the
reason, both are uncertain.”
However, no human being speaks this way who has learnt a little
bit only, has maybe learnt very much, and puts up all kinds of
philosophy from the learnt concepts. Thus a human being speaks
who has worked through what the knowledge researcher can go
through if he submerges with his soul forces only deeply enough
into that undergrounds of inner experience into which one can
submerge where one is confronted with the cliffs, the
partitions which one only penetrates if the spiritual organs
really awake if they become consciousness.
In
my life, I became acquainted with a number of such persons like
Gideon Spicker, and I have tried to reflect such characters in
the picture of Strader in my mystery dramas. However, I had to
experience with it that just those who are often called
followers of anthroposophy misunderstood me to the greatest
extent. While the persons whom these dramas show are taken out
of the real, comprehensive life, from that life that should
just show the necessity and the validity of spiritual science
from the other areas of modern existence, weird persons
believed, I would write such roles that are tailor-made for
those who should represent them, whereas I was just a far cry
from this.
I
could show with a comparison what such a person experiences who
does not get to the knowledge of spirit but to the insight of
the necessity of thinking. Someone who gets to the knowledge of
spirit knows that if one not only wants to consider the
thinking but experiences it, he does not experience, indeed,
that beyond the thinking that Gideon Spicker describes, the
bottomless abyss, the nightmarish darkness illuminated by no
beam of light, but he experiences the spiritual world beyond
this thinking that bears the sense-perceptible reality. He
experiences with his soul in this supersensible area. He also
experiences that there is no uncertainty whether a merciful God
or a bad demon has been put in the reason, but he experiences
and observes the spiritual that penetrates the reason, as the
sense perceptible world penetrates the sensory observation.
However, one must say that the thinking — if it is left
to itself if it is only thought, and is not experienced —
that such a development of the soul life can be compared
— you forgive for the somewhat odd comparison —
with a hungry organism. If one believes to be able to recognise
something of the highest questions by mere thinking —
God, freedom, immortality —, then one resembles a person
who does not want to still his hunger with food from the
outside, but lets the hunger develop. As little as you can
develop a hungry organism, so that it balances out its needs in
itself, just as little you can attain any spiritual content of
the soul and any solution of the questions of God, freedom,
immortality if you abandon yourself only to the thinking. As
you starve on and on unless you eat, you cannot attain the
spiritual development if you think only on and on.
The
older philosophical metaphysics wanted this. As hard as it is,
it is true: this outdated metaphysics that is something new,
however, to some people is nothing but a science that suffers
from mental malnutrition.
However, it is not enough that you gain this knowledge only to
understand the inner experience correctly. As you have to
understand that mere thinking leads to mental malnutrition if
this thinking does not brace itself up for inner experience,
you have also to understand that much knowledge of the outer
sense-perceptible reality and its processing by the intellect,
by methodical research do not lead to any knowledge of the
soul.
You
will convince yourselves if you take common textbooks of
psychology that one normally starts speaking about the nervous
system. What one says, otherwise, about the human organism is
borrowed from physiology, from natural sciences.
Now
I have to stress repeatedly not to be misunderstood that
spiritual science is a far cry from misjudging what natural
sciences have reached concerning the secrets of the nervous
life, the secrets of the human organism. I do not want to
discount its value. Nevertheless, the value is in another area
than in that of the soul knowledge. You may abandon yourself to
the mere thinking, then you starve; but abandoning yourself to
the outer observation for the knowledge of the soul life only
resembles the supply of all kinds of stuff that is
indigestible. If you fill your stomachs with stones or the
like, the human organism cannot make anything from this
indigestible stuff.
Thus you cannot suppose, if you take the scientific results
simply in such a way as they are and do not process them
mentally, that you receive any enlightenment of the spiritual
world, of the life of the soul in the supersensible realm. In
our times, people abandoned themselves to the most different
mental pictures that should explain how actually the soul
relates to the body. Not only that there the oddest fairy tales
are bustling about in that what one often calls science. One
wants to eradicate fairy tales and superstition from the outer
life, in science they often flourish, one only notes it in
science just as little as one noted it in the outer life of
former times. That fairy tale also belongs to it that the
nerves are telegraph wires to the soul that pass on the outer
sensory impressions, then again other nerves are there which
direct the will impulses to the periphery. About this fairy
tale, one would not like to talk at all, because what is meant
with this comparison is far away from reality and arises only
from an unnoticed scientific superstition.
However, I would like to emphasise two mental pictures that are
also widespread today with those who contemplate the
relationship of the body and the soul.
Some people believe that they have to regard the body or the
nervous system as a kind of tool of the soul, as if the soul is
a being that uses the body like a tool. The others who cannot
realise how a mental-spiritual being should find a working
point to work on something material like the body got even to
the weird mental picture of the mental-bodily parallelism.
There the processes of the body should proceed for themselves.
Without the soul working on the body like a cause or the body
reacting on the soul, the soul life should proceed in parallel
with the bodily processes. One current always accompanies the
other, but the one does not work on the other. Wundt (Wilhelm
W., 1832-1920), Ebbinghaus (Herman E., 1850-1909), Paulsen
(Friedrich, 1846-1908) and many others dedicate themselves to
this weird parallelism theory.
All
these theories suffer from the fact that they do not realise
what the coherence of the soul with the body is based on. This
coherence can be expressed neither by the fact that one says,
the body is the tool of the soul, nor that one says, the soul
processes proceed in parallel with the bodily phenomena.
However, I am able to bring only forward that what I can say
that encompasses a wide field as a result and observation of
anthroposophy. Everybody can find the other reasons in my
various writings. Nevertheless, I would like to show the
essentials briefly today.
If
one wants to express the relationship of soul and body
correctly, one has to say, as far as one considers the human
being, everything bodily of the human being turns out to be for
a real observation neither as tool nor as a process running
alongside but as a creation of the soul in microcosm and on a
large scale.
It
is nothing bodily at the human being that is no creation of the
soul. However, one has to cast off some prejudices and to take
up new concepts from spiritual science if one wants to envisage
this far-reaching idea that everything bodily is a creation of
the soul.
Already in microcosm, this is in such a way if we form any
mental picture if a feeling emerges in us. Yes, only because
one has not learnt to observe spiritually and bodily, one
believes that there something exterior works on a finished
body; the exterior effect spreads to the finished body through
the eye or ear, then the effect continues inwardly. Have an
unbiased look at the suitable theories. You will find
everywhere that they are not at all based on real observations
but on prejudices. Since what really goes forward if we
perceive if we hear anything, is already carried out, actually,
for the most part when we become aware of it, and is strictly
speaking always a developmental process in the body. A beam of
light hits us and causes something. It is in the same world in
which our body is. In our body, something goes forward. What
goes forward in it is of the same kind, only in microcosm, as
it is if on a large-scale forces form our organism on a large
scale. As the forces of growth and other forces form our
organism, something is formed in us if a beam of light hits us
if a tone hits us and so on. That which is formed there as
something subtle in us is reflected in the soul that is not in
the body but always in the supersensible realm. We become aware
of the reflection. The process, however, which must take place
there for the wake consciousness must be a destructive process,
a little death.
We
cannot completely convince ourselves of the consciousness, of
the soul being with the help of the usual consciousness
processes, and with bodily-spiritual observation. Nevertheless,
if we come on what also accompanies our usual awake life, on
the forming of memories, we come already nearer to that which I
have just said. Someone who is able to observe what goes
forward in the human being knows: what makes a mental picture
aware to us does not lead straight away to memories. No,
something has always to run alongside, another process has to
take place. If you have sense for observation, look at a pupil
who studies hard ever so much; what he must perform as
auxiliary exercises, so that that which he takes up also goes
over into his memory. For a subconscious accompanying process
must proceed always. That which we know does not remain to us,
but that which goes alongside the consciousness in the
subconsciousness. However, that which happens there in our
organism by this side flow of the consciousness is still very
similar to the growth processes of childhood.
The
origin of mental pictures is a growth process in microcosm.
Usually we grow like with tremendous power in proportion to the
small growth process that takes place in us, unnoticed in the
usual life if memory forms. Under the surface of the current of
the conscious mental pictures, events happen which carry the
memories; and this is very like the growth processes. Do you
ask why one can well train the memory just in your youth?
Because you still have fresh growth forces in yourselves,
because they have not yet withered. However, I can always give
such single proofs only; you can prove what I have said with
many single observations.
Our
usual imagining, feeling and willing intervenes already in such
a way that it is reflected not only and makes aware what
happens; but in such a way as concerning the memory an
undercurrent is there for our conscious life, there is also an
upper current. As one does not note the undercurrent —
one notes it at most if the pupil studies hard and does
movements and knocks its head to support this undercurrent
—, one does not note the upper current all the more.
However, this upper current belongs above all to that second
human being who sleeps there in the usual human being, while we
think, feel, and will in our usual life.
Just as the current of memory proceeds beneath the
consciousness, something purely mental proceeds above the
consciousness, something that does not intervene at all anyhow
in the body. Because this conscious soul life has such
hyper-experience, I would like to say, the forces of growth are
not sufficient for this conscious soul life, for the entire
soul life at all. The forces that lead the human being to birth
are not sufficient. These forces could only evoke that in the
human being that we perceive with the sleeping organism.
At
the moment when the consciousness intervenes with its upper
currents in the organism, those forces which also destroy this
organism finally at death must intervene in the organism. These
forces are destructive forces, so that the forces of growth
must balance out them in sleep. Only then, one understands the
supersensible life of the soul if one knows how far the purely
organic reaches subsensibly.
I
do not like speaking about personal experiences; what I tell,
however, is associated substantially with that which I
generally have to bring forward. I confess that I intensely
pursued the problems about which I speak today and in my
writings since for more than thirty years on all ways that may
arise. These ways have to lead the soul into the area of
spiritual life and in the coherence of this spiritual-mental
life with the bodily life. I have found that — if you go
about your work scientifically in the sense of our time
honestly and sincerely — you really can obtain many
fertile things, while you discipline yourself scientifically.
On this way then you just find those questions for whose
solution the usual natural sciences do not suffice. Yes, just
from scientific thinking one gets other observation results
about what is in natural sciences, actually.
The
question of the nature of the nervous system was one of the
biggest ones to me for decades, which the scientific
psychologists, the psychological scientists regard as the organ
of the soul who imagine that in the nerves an inner activity
takes place, which is similar to other organ activities. Well,
such activities also proceed in the nerves, but they do just
not serve the forming of mental pictures, of feelings and will
impulses. They serve the nutrition of the nerves, the
production of the nervous substance if it has been consumed.
They just do not serve the soul life; however, they must be
there, so that the soul life can take place. I use a comparison
that I have used here already once.
If
you consider the nervous system as something that must be there
for the soul life, you just have something, as if you say, the
ground must be there, so that I do not fall into the depth if I
want to go. However, if I go and the ground is soft, I leave
behind tracks. Then someone will completely err who checks the
ground and searches the forces in it, which my footprints have
produced from inside. As little as these forces produce tracks
from inside, any inner forces of the brain and nervous system
produce the tracks that originate from imagining, feeling, and
willing. There the mental works which prevails in the
supersensible area.
Before one does not realise this and experiences it as real
observation, one can generally come to no understanding of the
true nature of the soul. That which is on the bottom of the
soul life in the nervous life is not the organic processes of
the nervous system — they lead to another direction
—, this is that which I would like to specify now. I have
brought in the preceding personal remark, so that you realise
that I do not frivolously pronounce something such substantial
that it is hard gained what I say about the nervous life: while
organic forces go into the nervous ramifications, the human
being goes over from life to death. In the nervous
ramifications, the human being dies perpetually, if he uses
these nervous ramifications for thinking, feeling, or
willing.
The
organic life does not continue as the growth conditions do, but
it dies away, while ramifying in the nerves. While it dies
away, it prepares the ground for the spiritual development, for
the purely supersensible mental. As I remove the air with a
pump from a container, produce vacuum, and then the air
completely flows again into the container by itself, in the
same way mental life flows in the dead part of the nervous
system perpetually if the organism sends the partial death into
it.
Hence, the partial death is the basis of consciousness. If one
recognises that the human being does not need to pour his
organic forces into his body to make this body the place of the
soul, but that the human being needs to kill his organic
experience to withdraw this organic life constantly from the
places to which the nerves give the opportunity, you notice how
the supersensible soul life can develop in the sensory body,
however, after it has created this sensory body first. Since
the same soul, which thinks, feels and wills in the time from
conception to death, exists also before. The spiritual world is
not anywhere in a cloud-cuckoo-land, it is there where the
sense-perceptible world is also; it penetrates it. Where
sensory effects are, they originate from supersensible,
spiritual effects. This same soul lives in the supersensible
world that has formed the body and has changed it into the
apparatus reflecting the processes to it of which you can
become aware. Before it came to conception, it lived in the
supersensible world, and in this life on earth, it is connected
with the supersensible world. This soul exists already since
centuries, before it enters the sense-perceptible existence at
conception. As in the life between birth and death this soul
has created the body as its image and unfolds its life with
this image of the body, the life of the soul unfolds the forces
that develop the forces of heredity from the supersensible
world.
It
is correct that that which we pass on originates in the
successive generations. However, our soul works already on
them. We insert the forces in our ancestors by the effects of
our soul that we receive then as inherited. Thus, we develop
our whole organism from the spiritual world as we form
something with the memory in microcosm; and only the base, the
opportunity of it is given by the sensory heredity. The body is
completely a creation of the mental-spiritual. As well as the
single experience between birth and death is based on a
creation of the spiritual, the entire human body is also based
on the spiritual-mental. However, there are incorporated not
only the forces of growth in this developmental current but
also the forces that appear finally in the total sum as death
which is only the outside of immortality.
Since while the mental-spiritual puts the body in the world, is
reflected with it, it experiences its own life in the
supersensible area. However, at the same time it destroys the
body because the upper current mentioned just now develops. As
every consciousness is based on a partial death, the complete
death is nothing but the withdrawal of the soul from the body
that is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We
know: as we develop memories between birth and death, we
developed the inner human being in the supersensible current
who goes through births and deaths who is everlasting.
What I have indicated as soul experience is not anything that
the spiritual researcher produces, it is the characterised
second human being whom one only oversleeps, otherwise, but is
always in the human being. Spiritual research is nothing but
making people aware of that what is perpetual and eternal in
the human being, so that he can go through death. If you are
able to move with your mental in the spiritual in the intimated
way as you move with your senses in the physical-sensory, then
you know that you live as a human being also in a spiritual
world as one lives with the senses in a physical world. As one
distinguishes the mineral, plant and animal realms in the
physical world, one distinguishes realms in the spiritual
world, which are full of beings that become more and more
spiritual the higher you ascend to which the human being
belongs with his soul, as he belongs with his body to the
physical realms. Briefly, the soul consciously enters in the
spiritual world.
I
would like to call this worldview Goetheanism after its
origins, as well as I would call the building in Dornach
Goetheanum that is dedicated to this worldview. Since not on
some daydreams but on the healthy condition on which the
Goethean worldview is based that is also based what I mean as
anthroposophy. Goethe differed in his view of the physical
things just by such conditions from that what originated later
as natural sciences. However, Goethe developed such scientific
concepts that these concepts may sit heavily in the soul's
stomach like stones, but can be transformed, so that you reach
the mental realm with these scientific concepts. Goethe himself
did not yet found spiritual science; he did not get around to
doing this. Nevertheless, he developed his theory of
metamorphosis so that you only need to develop the internal
experience from the principles further, then you also attain
knowledge of the mental-spiritual experience.
Whereto does the common psychology, actually, come? A very
significant philosopher of the present, Franz Brentano
(1838-1917), who died recently, had a rich knowledge life
behind himself. He was a fighter in this area; last, he found
asylum during this war in Zurich. He attempted to cope with
thinking, feeling, and willing his whole life through, beside
his other profound researches in the psychological field. These
three concepts play a particular role in psychology. Franz
Brentano did not advance further than to a classification, did
not advance where one can grasp the mental itself only as
something living. If one clusters imagining, feeling, willing
so simply mechanically, one has three classes. To grasp the
mental as something living, one has to grasp the mental, now,
however, the spiritual-mental, in such a way as Goethe tried to
grasp the outer physical things with his theory of
metamorphosis, as Goethe imagined the green leaves of the stalk
transformed into the petals, even into the fruit organs. As he
attempted to explain all organs by a transformation into each
other, one must not only leave thinking, feeling, and willing
side by side, but also gain the living transition of them.
There I can bring in the research results again which matured
in myself for a long time. Our will is not only put so
externally beside the feeling and the imagining, but the
feeling has simply originated as a metamorphosis of the will in
such a way as the petal forms from the stalk leaf; and
imagining develops from feeling. At the end the anthroposophist
gets to the result that the will is basically a young being
which if it becomes older changes into feeling, and if it
becomes even older into thinking, into mental pictures. In the
imagining the same is always mysteriously contained which is
also inside feeling and willing. However, we do not experience
how mental pictures arise from feeling.
However, if the soul has developed its spiritual organs, it
experiences a mysterious feeling in all its mental pictures,
but not a feeling which is bound to our body, but which leads
us on the detour of the mental picture into the vastnesses of
the spiritual world. You experience — if you are not led
by the feeling into your bodily, but are led into the
vastnesses of the spiritual world — that supersensible in
which we are between death and a new birth. Then you experience
the supersensible world with higher knowledge than the usual
mental pictures are, with spiritual-mental knowledge.
However, most people would like to experience this
supersensible world after the methods of the sensory world.
They are not contented to experience it only in pictures, in
Imaginations. They would like to experience it with the senses.
However, as the body has to die to become pure spirit, one has
to cast off the sensory knowledge that combines with the
material. Knowledge has to become Imagination, so that in the
Imaginative experience which is as subtle as imagination, but
not so arbitrary, the sensory-material is cast off, and a
picture of that reality is already attained between birth and
death that the human being experiences after death.
Hence, nobody can hope to recognise the supersensible who would
like to hear voices or to get other material effects like the
spiritists do, while because of a weird self-deception these
want to tackle, actually, the supersensible and put something
sense-perceptible to themselves. With that subtle spiritual
experience, which must happen if one wants to experience the
imperishable human being, just many people are not content
today. Only this supersensible experience can lead us to the
real knowledge of the soul being in the supersensible field
that leads us to a true view of the relationship of the body to
the soul and that of the soul to the body.
As
the feeling changes into imagining, the willing does it too. As
one can find a feeling mysteriously in every mental picture,
one also discovers a will impulse, which does not lead us to
the movements of the limbs, to sensory actions, but leads us
from imagining into the supersensible world.
If
one discovers the young soul being of willing in the old-grown
soul being of imagining, one discovers in this willing which is
experienced purely spiritually those forces which work from the
preceding life on earth on this life on earth. Then the
repeated lives on earth and the intermediate lives in the
purely supersensible world become real observation; then the
human being gets to the real supersensible knowledge.
One
could think that the supersensible knowledge is there only to
satisfy the human need of knowledge. Let me quite briefly, at
the end, only indicate with few words that this does not hold
true. One could believe that only the human need of knowledge
is satisfied, but this has its deep practical significance.
Indeed, one is concerned with progress in the evolution of
humanity. The Copernican worldview, the modern natural sciences
came only, after humanity had gone through other levels before.
Thus, the anthroposophical spiritual science only originates if
the urge to recognise the supersensible is strong enough in the
human beings. Many people who know that there is a
supersensible world still believe that today the human beings
are not ripe to develop those free cognitive forces to wake the
sleeping human being. The opposite is the case! Today the human
being thirsts for supersensible knowledge. He numbs himself
only as I have said at the beginning of this talk.
This cannot go on this way for other reasons, too. One can
recognise nature without ascending to laws that make the soul
life explicable. You can even say that you can recognise nature
the better, the more you keep away from any mental-spiritual
while developing physical laws. The physical laws will be the
more suited for their field, the less one confuses them with
laws that refer only to the mental-spiritual. One has already
to say this. However, as soon as it concerns the complete
understanding of human life, so that our understanding can
intervene in the development of this human life, as soon as it
concerns the social and political living together, as soon as
it concerns generally finding a right relation from human being
to human being, something else is necessary. Then the thoughts
that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences are
not sufficient.
Unfortunately, humanity has got used very much to thinking life
after such thought forms after which one imagines natural
processes. Thus people also have instinctively familiarised
themselves with the social life, with the political living
together in such a way and also to form it as the spirit forms
which only is just used to thinking physical laws. More and
more this has developed that way during the last four
centuries. As it is correct if natural sciences exclude the
spirit from their field, it is insufficient for the human
living together, for everything that is connected with society,
with sociology to develop thought forms that originate only
from natural sciences. One does not become ready with how the
human beings have to live together all over the world if one
wants to develop this living together after political, after
social ideals that are produced after the pattern of scientific
principles.
One
example of many: when this tragic war broke out, one could hear
from many sides, just from the people who called themselves
experts of the laws of human living together: this war can last
no longer than at most four to five months. — In full
seriousness, these persons said this from their scientifically
developed thinking, which also exists with that who is not a
physical scientist. Just the greatest experts spoke this way.
How sadly has reality disproved these mental pictures! Nobody
who figures spiritual-scientifically out the world can dedicate
himself to such mistakes because he knows which difference
exists between escapist mental pictures and realistic ones.
What fulfils our souls as spiritual science brings us together
with reality; it puts us into the full reality. A social
science, which really copes with this living together of human
beings around the whole world which should not bring in
instincts, impulses to the human beings which discharge as the
today's dreadful, catastrophic events discharge — such a
social science can arise only from the conditions which
spiritual science gives. Since it deals not with a part of life
but with the whole life; hence, it only can generate mental
pictures and concepts that cope with reality.
If
people do not force themselves to build up their social
thinking based on spiritual science, humanity will not come out
of the calamities that discharge today so frightfully. I can
appreciate what goes out from the people who one calls
pacifists or similarly. However, such things cannot be decided
by mere orders, cannot be decided by the fact that one decrees:
this and that must be.
One
can absolutely agree with that which must be. However, if one
only produces the orders, only the laws of the usual thinking,
it is in such a way, as if one says to a stove: dear stove, it
is your duty to heat the room; hence, heat the room. — It
will not heat the room, without putting wood into it and making
a fire.
Just as little all the usual ideas of peacekeeping et cetera
are sufficient. It concerns that one not only says, human
beings, love each other, but that one puts heating material
into the human souls. However, these are concepts that arise
from the living conception of spiritual life.
Since the soul does not only belong to the material, it belongs
to the spiritual life. One does often not understand even
today, what it means that this human soul belongs to the
supersensible area. One usually thinks that one is with the
laws which one develops today already in the supersensible
area. One does not do this.
Just in the fields of serious science one often starts
realising already that it is also significant to check for
human experience not only that which scientific prejudice has
sketched out in the last decades but also that there other
concepts, other ideas are necessary.
Did
we not experience the strange play in the last time that one of
the most loyal disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922),
the famous physiologist, wrote a book in which he says farewell
to the whole outwardness of Darwin's theory which wants to
explain the evolution only with a sum of contingencies, of
coincidences, which does not want that forces intervene in this
evolution that one cannot recognise with mere outer
observation. Thus, one experienced the strange case that Oscar
Hertwig wrote a significant book in the last time: The
Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of
Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). In this book in which
serious science itself attempts to come out from the only
material, to ascend to the spiritual, Oscar Hertwig closes his
explanations with the following considerations:
“The interpretation of Darwin's theory which is so
ambiguous with its indefiniteness also permitted a versatile
use in other fields of the economic, social, and political
life. From it everybody could get desired answers, like from a
Delphi oracle, concerning its practical applications on social,
political, hygienic, medical, and other fields and refers as
affirmation of his assertions to the Darwinian biology with its
immutable physical principles. However, if now these putative
principles are no real ones” — Oscar Hertwig
believes to have proved that —, “should there not
be social dangers with its versatile practical application on
other fields? Nevertheless, do not believe that the human
society can use phrases like the relentless struggle for
existence, the selection of the fittest, the natural perfection
etc. transferring them to the most different fields without
being deeper influenced in the whole direction of its ideation.
One could easily prove this assertion with many phenomena of
modern times. Just therefore the decision of truth and error of
Darwinism is beyond the scope of biological science.”
There you recognise how a naturalist realises: what the human
beings think and what of their thoughts changes over into their
impulses, that prepares and develops what then in the outer
reality comes into being; the spiritual is also the creator of
the material in the social field.
If
the material appears in such figure as today, one has to search
other reasons in the spiritual than someone searches them who
goes forward with his concepts of the social only after the
pattern of natural sciences. Spiritual science that is based on
occultism will work different on the social life; it will not
speak only of a relentless struggle for existence, but it will
figure out what positions itself as something spiritual in that
which appears in nature only as struggle for existence. It
considers not only the existence after the outside, but after
that which the spirit has poured into it; it will not only
judge the course of evolution by its functionality but also by
that which has been put as something ethical in the course of
purposefulness. It will not only speak of perfection by natural
selection but of the creative spirit that flows into the
developmental current and creates the natural selection as well
as the soul creates its body. It will search the bases of the
social laws above all in the supersensible.
There we can already realise that spiritual science is not
something that satisfies mere knowledge, but something that is
intimately associated with the practical need, with the whole
course of life. The future will demand those bases of thinking
just for the practical life that can originate only from
spiritual science.
Why
are the human beings reluctant even today to accept spiritual
science? Just from that which I have said now one can get an
answer. We were mainly concerned this evening how spiritual
science pursues the riddle of immortality. However, death
separates us from immortality. We have realised that just in
the course of life we have to recognise the perpetual
intervention of death. In ancient times, one always said,
someone who enters into the spiritual world must experience
death symbolically.
It
is maybe a radical diction, but it is true. Between our world
of the senses and the intellect that analyzes the sensory
observations and the world of immortality is no world of growth
but of death. One has to envisage death; one has to look at the
destructive forces that counteract the forces that just natural
sciences regard as the forces of growth.
This produces something similar in the area of knowledge, as it
is the fear of death in the outer life. One can already speak
of the fact that people do not have the courage to penetrate
that area through which one must go if one wants to enter into
the supersensible. The human beings shrink from it. They do not
know it. They deceive themselves with all kinds of theories and
prejudices of limits of knowledge, with any only material
significance of life. They rather deceive themselves than that
they pass that gate courageously through which one can come
only from the sensory to the extrasensory world. However, the
gate is that by which one must recognise the nature of death.
Since it is true: the human being will find adequate harmony of
his soul only if he can absorb the secrets of immortality.
Nevertheless, to the fruit of knowledge that can be enjoyed as
immortality one gets only if one ploughs over the ground of
death. However, one must not be afraid of it. As the human
being overcomes the deadly fear of knowledge in the area of
cognition, a science of the immortal, of the supersensible will
originate. Tomorrow I speak about the fact that this science of
the supersensible disturbs nobody's religious confession. I
hope that I do not engage your attention tomorrow as long as
today; but I was not able to shorten this basic talk.
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