VII
The
Nature of the Human Soul and the Nature of the Human Body
Basel, 30 October 1918
In
this talk, I would like to give a picture of that what
anthroposophy has to say about the most different areas of life
and to start from some of its most significant results for the
knowledge of the human soul life and its relation to the bodily
life.
It
seems that this psychology has to deliver the bases of the most
important questions of life, of the boundary questions of
existence. Since, nevertheless, one cannot deny that the
present cultural life only accepts scientifically established
knowledge. If one deals with the big riddles of the soul life
today, one does not only ask this or that denomination, but
approaches the world riddles also scientifically. That is why
one will also ask psychology: what has psychology to say about
birth and death of the human being? What has it to say about
the relation of the transient to the everlasting of the human
being?
However, one has to say,: when soul science which is
acknowledged even today by tradition has turned to the modern
thinking, this modern soul science got more or less into cloudy
waters. If one speaks of modern psychology, one has to remind
of a psychologist, the late Franz Brentano (1838-1917) who
wanted to dedicate his life and investigations to the knowledge
of the soul life in the last third of the nineteenth century.
When he published the first volume of his Psychology from an
Empirical Standpoint, he said something strange. He said
that one has to take a new way with reference to the soul
knowledge which can justify itself towards natural sciences.
Tomorrow should be talk of the fact that the way which is
discussed here in this talk can justify itself towards natural
sciences.
Franz Brentano attempted to approach the soul life with the
same methods and way of thinking which one uses in natural
sciences. Then he said, in course of time the soul science has
solely considered imagining, feeling, willing, memory,
attention, love, hatred, and the like. Modern natural sciences
have brought to light all sorts of things, but it seems as if
by the scientific way of thinking and methods psychology does
not get to the big hopes — as Franz Brentano says —
which already Plato and Aristotle had: the hope to gain a view
of the everlasting of the human being by psychology.
That is why Franz Brentano means: if one can give ever so
precise information how mental pictures follow each other how
they associate in the soul with each other how they associate
with feelings and will impulses, nevertheless, it is impossible
to get to the real boundary questions of the soul life.
Nevertheless, Franz Brentano still hoped in those days to be
able to get to a psychology finally by applying
scientific-methodical research that grants views into these
boundary questions of existence.
The
noteworthy fact is that Franz Brentano, when he published the
first volume of his Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint, which was intended for three to four volumes,
the next volume should already appear in the autumn of the same
year and the following volumes should be published within a
short time. However, nothing appeared. I have told this fact
already here.
That who gets involved with the special course of development
of Brentano will discover that this serious researcher could
not continue this work not for outer reasons but for inner
reasons. That who pursues his following articles and books will
realise how this man did attempts repeatedly to penetrate
deeper into the soul life, and how they failed repeatedly.
Somebody who looks for an answer from the different experiences
which one can do, if one approaches modern psychology, finds
that Franz Brentano, as well as his whole school and almost all
the other psychologies shy away from entering into a real
spiritual science.
Just in scientific circles, one shrinks from giving psychology
a quite different face if it should be effective again for the
human being. You receive a feeling if you open yourself to the
psychological literature today that in this psychology even
today always mental pictures prevail, as they were used since
centuries.
Psychology has not changed much of these mental pictures. In
the area of natural sciences, however, something has changed,
and psychology has not kept abreast of this development up to
now. Only a superficial consideration of this development can
ignore the most essential that quite different thoughts and
ideas prevailed. One does not want to admit this. One does not
want to realise even today that concepts and ideas have changed
thoroughly. However, the change has only taken place in the
scientific area up to now.
At
first, I would like to characterise this change in such a way:
one had certain mental pictures once by which one could enclose
the soul life and the physical life outdoors, so that they
satisfied the demands of that time. One applied the same mental
pictures that one applied to the phenomena of nature also to
the human soul life. Soul life and physical life were not yet
so separated as they are today by the advanced natural
sciences. Natural sciences themselves have sorted things out in
their area. They have demanded new mental pictures by strictly
scientific observation methods, in particular by art of
experimenting.
Psychology has stopped mostly at the old mental pictures. That
is why that which psychology offers today is strictly speaking
not after something objective, but appears only as word. Mental
pictures, feelings, will impulses, memory, attention, even love
and hatred: indeed, one can feel that they are realities in our
soul life. However, in the scientific psychology one has empty
phrases for it that do no longer correspond to that which must
be demanded from true science today.
Just as natural sciences had to advance to new concepts and
ideas for three to four centuries, and in particular, in the
nineteenth century, psychology has to advance if it does not
want to remain infertile. It has to take the plunge to new
starting points.
I
do not want to keep up you to show how just with that what one
calls thinking, feeling, and willing in psychological books
does not give you anything real. I want to point to the fact
only that just thereby psychology has missed its real
vocation.
You
all probably know that if the human being looks at those big
boundary questions of existence he seldom observes the academic
psychology that should give some indication of that. He does
not find anything in it. He finds all sorts of, I would like to
say, little portrayals, how a mental picture associates with
another mental picture, how mental pictures evoke other mental
pictures et cetera, but he does not find what interests him,
actually. One does not want to admit in this area that just the
scientific thinking if it gets along with itself does not get
further in psychology that it reaches an impasse, it gets to
mere empty phrases.
However, this would be the first negative step so to speak to
get to a real psychology. Spiritual science follows this way.
It tries to get things straight concerning the kind of the
scientific mental pictures. While it positions itself
positively to the scientific research, it becomes able to
recognise that that research breaks off as it were if one wants
to grasp the soul life. One can grasp this soul life only if
one resorts to a completely transformed thinking, generally to
a transformed inside. Maybe it will still last long, until in
more human beings this internal boldness awakes to prepare
their whole inside in order to behold into the soul.
Nevertheless, if soul science should originate again in a
promising and fertile way for the human beings, this step is
necessary.
I
will explain the details of the spiritual-scientific soul
research in the tomorrow's talk. Today I want to mention only
how from two sides spiritual science tries to prepare the
inside of the human being in such a way that it can really
behold into the soul life. One side is a special development of
thinking, of imagining. One forms a quite wrong idea of
spiritual science if one believes that it deals with any
spiritistic or mystic method. This spiritual science will prove
to be the clearest which someone can find in science today who
really wants to penetrate into it. Above all it concerns of
strengthening the imagining, the thinking. It concerns that we
only carry out the thinking as it were as a concomitant of life
and research in the usual life and in the usual science.
We
open ourselves to everything in the outer life that works on
the senses. We also open ourselves to that in science, which
enables us to observe by experiments. We let the thoughts be
inspired which lead us to the physical principles. The thoughts
that originate as it were only accompanied by the outer life in
the soul just prove to be insufficient if you want to behold
into the soul life. They lead to nothing.
You
have to experience that at first. Hence, it concerns of
projecting yourself in the imagining life in such a way that
you imagine solely, so that you find out internally how it is,
actually, if you only think, only imagine. It is completely
irrelevant what you imagine. It concerns only that —
tomorrow I speak about the further details — you do this
imagining and this thinking in such a way that you dedicate
yourself to it meditatively. So that you just experience in
this thinking what you cannot experience, otherwise, that the
inside of the human being attunes itself if it follows a bare
thought, if it is an imagination thought, if it is a thought
taken from without.
If
you really experience the thinking internally as methodically
as you experience, otherwise, the outer phenomena which present
themselves, then you experience something that must touch a
modern human being in strange way, just if you have tried to
deal with the psychological views which have come down.
Someone who settles in the meditative thinking comes into
conflict with the most approved views that originated from
Augustinism at first, that have gone over then to Descartes
that also haunt in the present soul anew and that have slipped
in any thinking which approaches the soul with old methods,
with old thinking.
A
proposition goes like a motto through the entire modern
philosophy. This is the proposition by Descartes “cogito,
ergo sum.” “I think, therefore I am.”
Augustine said this already. It is that to which the thinkers
have come who said to themselves: well, if the outer world
presents itself to us, maybe it deceives us, maybe everything
is illusionary that eyes and ears manifest to us, which cause
them. There is one certainty, Augustin already said which is
directly experienced, and this is the fact that I think. Since
if I also doubt everything that the world manifests to me,
nevertheless, I must just doubt, that is I think. Hence, I am
in my thinking myself. If I doubt, I think; therefore I am,
cogito, ergo sum.
I
do not say all that because I possibly believe that
philosophical views control the thinking of many persons or
because I believe that that which the modern human being thinks
about the soul is an outflow of that what these philosophers
said. No, but because that what these philosophers have said is
just a reflection of that what humanity has thought through
centuries. Not that the human beings have learnt to think from
the philosophers, but the philosophers have used concepts that
the human beings knew that are to be driven from the field by
the methods to which modern spiritual science has to point.
This modern spiritual science, while it urges the human being
to experience the thinking independently makes him realise: the
more one thinks, the more one continues that with the mere
thinking what one has, otherwise, only as a concomitant of the
outer life, the more one comes just into unreality; not into
the reality of the inner life. Before one does not acknowledge
the proposition “I think, therefore I am
not,” one will not get to real psychology.
It
is necessary to take the step to a real psychology in such
radical way that one puts an end to the view: “I think,
therefore I am” — and can bring himself to realise,
if we start with the thinking lively internally, we go away
from the real being: I think, therefore I am not. You
learn to recognise that if you put yourself more and more in
the thinking; while you just strengthen the thinking, you find
out: while I think, I cease being.
Actually, sleep would already disprove the proposition I think,
therefore I am. Since in sleep we do not think in the sense of
Augustine or Descartes, also not in the sense of Bergson or
similar philosophers. Well, this is the first: taking the step
to realise the unreality of the inner experience with
thinking.
The
second is that it is something dreadful, actually, for every
human being who takes these things seriously that, while he
wants to advance to the so-called self-knowledge, thinking just
leads him to nothingness. Then from the second side one has to
support the spiritual-scientific method. While the meditative
life cultivates the thinking, the will must be cultivated on
the other side. We recognise the will, actually, if we get any
relation to the outside world. As well as we have the thinking
more or less as a concomitant of the outer observation or of
the scientific researching, we have the will as a concomitant
of our acting: we experience it if we are active outside.
Besides, something escapes from our observation where the will
plays a quite significant role. We live in time. We all look
back to the time of our birth and know that it last some time
until death. We live in time. However, we live not only in
time; we develop in time. That who can eye his inside calmly
knows that with the help of his body, with the help of
education and other means he himself works on his
transformation, on his development.
We
are different in every period of life, and we always work on
our changing. This inner work is necessary to practise
self-discipline. That means that self-education does not only
take place unconsciously, but that one has to work with those
methods consciously on his transformation. Thereby you
recognise that this conscious transformation is a quite
essential work in the will. You get to know, actually, the will
if you take charge of your self-discipline.
However, this gives the soul life certain forces from two sides
with which you can gain quite different starting points of a
psychology than they exist generally up to now. Above all:
someone who has sharpened his thinking in such a way as it is
meant with these methods can consider the whole course of life
different. Then only he is able to observe the former soul life
really which accompanies us always. Then he can understand
certain moments in this soul life and focus on them really,
what, otherwise, you do not manage with any concept but with
those mental pictures and soul impulses that one develops in
such a way as I have stated. They can reach the inner soul
life. While all the other concepts try in vain to grasp the
mental.
Then one also acknowledges the unreality of our being while
imagining. This is the first step that one knows that imagining
is not real. As much as modern psychology may collect with the
old means from the mental pictures, as much as it wants to rest
upon the proposition “I think, therefore I am,” it
never gets any mental reality from the thinking because we do
not exist while we think because we can find that only in the
thinking, which is not real with us. The unreality of thinking
is the first that the human being recognises if he is able to
strengthen his thinking if he wants to discipline his will.
If
one looks at the feeling which psychology wants to observe, one
is not able to do it. Why is that? — Just someone can
answer that question who has investigated the imagining and
willing as I have described. He learns to recognise that the
feeling, observed with usual means, appears confused. There the
unreality of thinking, here the confusion of feeling.
A
third one is particularly clear if one takes such ways as I
have described them: the incomprehensibility of the will.
Unreality of thinking, confusion of feeling,
incomprehensibility of willing.
You
need only to take such books like that by Theodor Ziehen
(1862-1950, neurologist, psychiatrist, Guide to
Physiological Psychology. 1891), then you realise that just
those who rest upon present scientific mental pictures in
psychology can be blinded, isn't that so? At least they believe
that one can understand something of thinking. Feeling is to
them only nuancing the thinking. But the will escapes them
completely. One realises that one acts. One assumes that
something takes place. However, the usual concepts cannot look
into that which the will really is.
One
has to apply those forces that one has obtained with the
mentioned methods also to the soul life. It is good to take the
starting point from the feeling, not from the thinking, also
not from the will. There it becomes obvious that you cannot
understand the feeling if you envisage one single moment of the
human life only. One can never understand that which I feel now
if one considers this present feeling only. One can understand
it only if one considers the Before and the After. Let me start
from a concrete case.
Somebody sets himself the task to understand Goethe's feeling,
for example, in 1790. One struggles, while one tries first to
visualise how Goethe felt in 1790. How were his sensations
nuanced to the world et cetera? If one has got ideas of it, one
puts the question to himself: yes, how does this feeling of
1790 relate to his feeling 15 years ago, to his feeling after
the next fifteen years? — One is urged to the right thing
by the method that I have described. Finally, one is urged to
look at his whole life. Psychology has to consider biographies
from such a viewpoint, as I characterised it. Goethe's feeling
in 1790 would have been generally incomprehensible, even to
Goethe, in 1790. We only start understanding it, while we face
his whole life.
If
we study that carefully what manifested of Goethe's being
between 1790 and 1832, we study that what worked on Goethe from
his birth, in 1749 until 1790, and we try to consider Goethe's
life in its effectiveness after 1790 in such a way as we are
accustomed to refer scientific things to each other, to that
what he experienced before 1790, then the special feeling
nuance of 1790 arises. Everything that we feel at a point is an
effect of our own future on our own past. One will study
biographies this way in future! One will also face the single
human being this way.
One
will say to himself, it is strange that in that which expresses
itself in the feeling already shows not only the impact of the
future life, but also that of the whole past life. However, one
will get the experience with such studies that some
determination is necessary for such studies. Since it will
belong to these methods, for example, to ask himself, how does
develop the emotional life of those human beings who very soon
died after that time at which one looks? There arises something
very interesting for a study of the emotional life.
One
will find out that that which lives in a human being in the
immediate present is the pressure of his future on his past. We
also have the confusion of the emotional life, the mysterious
of the feeling life because we have kept the past in mind and
the future is shrouded in darkness. If we deeper investigate
the human being, then the next step is possibly that one also
tries to familiarise himself with the imagining life. One asks
himself, what imagines in the human being so that he imagines
that he can resolve to have thoughts about this and that?
— Nobody can answer that question who cannot observe the
moment of awakening appropriately.
Just as a future psychology will not start from all sounding
phrases which you now find about the feeling in the textbooks
of psychology, just as a future psychology will also not start
from the so-called observation of imagining, but will feel
pressured into going back to a reality which is over for the
usual life: the awakening. The awakening happens for the usual
life at one moment. The human being goes from sleep to the wake
life, and he seldom finds opportunity to bethink himself, in
the jumbled way of awakening, how he has woken. However, even
if he found it, he could not at all understand this with the
usual imagining. He can understand it only if he soars such an
image as I have described it as a result of the meditative
thinking.
However, the human being stands there, I would like to say, at
the abyss that he must realise something unreal in the
imagining. On the other hand, this imagining is refined and
strengthened. With it, the human being is only able to observe
the moment of awakening.
The
method, which spiritual science has in this area, enables the
researcher to face such a moment in such a way as the
naturalist faces the electrostatic generator or another
apparatus or a phenomenon of nature. Then the moment of
awakening appears to the strengthened or transformed imagining
in such a way that one looks into it immediately and can say to
himself, you emerge from a world that was interspersed with
thoughts from falling asleep until awakening as your day life
is interspersed with thoughts.
This is the great discovery that you can do. Indeed, you find
tips with single psychologists everywhere that one says, even
if one does not know that one dreams perpetually, one dreams
perpetually. However, one not only dreams — this is the
discovery, which the strengthened thinking accomplishes
—, but one also learns to recognise that the wake
consciousness is something else than to be filled with
thoughts. This is looking at the thoughts that you have by day.
You cannot look only at the thoughts that fulfil you from
falling asleep until awakening because you forget that which
you have experienced in sleep at the moment of awakening.
This is just an important moment where you start realising that
you emerge from a life of thoughts that remains unaware to the
usual consciousness, you emerge from a true sea of thoughts.
Then another observation is connected with it.
Only if you can look at that sea of thoughts that also
penetrate the soul if it does not have the day consciousness,
you recognise why you know nothing of these thoughts in your
day consciousness. Since you notice: at the moment of awakening
you cannot take everything in the body what you have
experienced in sleep. However, the body is the only tool of
thinking. You must use the body. You cannot draw in what
pervades your soul as night thoughts. The body is inappropriate
to take them in.
If
one has recognised which real process forms the basis there
that one lives, indeed, during sleep in a spiritual world which
cannot enter into the body which exists for itself —. it
is just the typical that this world cannot enter —, then
one can find the transition from this experience to the usual
imagining and thinking.
Since the same takes place, only in pictorial way, if you get
to a mental picture while you are dozing or observing the
outside world. Thinking and imagining is nothing but a
decreased awakening in relation to reality. We wake up if we
grasp any thought. It will be the important of the new
psychology that it realises that awakening not only exists if
we rub our eyes in the morning from sleep, but we are awaking
perpetually. Nevertheless, the force that controls our whole
life just appears especially strong at the moment of awakening,
in so far as we grasp mental pictures or thoughts. Thus, that
force penetrates us perpetually which manifests in the
awakening, in grasping thoughts.
However, thereby we also know that this grasping thoughts is
correspondent to a world which cannot enter into the human
organism. While we think, however, we have to reduce reality to
pictures because our body urges us. Reality is not admitted at
the moment of awakening. However, we also learn to recognise
that we could not have these pictures of imagining unless in
our body the spiritual reality existed. From there you gain the
possibility, while you have progressed on one side by the
awakening to the imagining, of going back from the awakening to
an important moment of life, to birth, or we say, to
conception. You have gained the possibility because you have
awoken in yourself that soul force, which reveals that
imagining is a perpetual awakening. If you have this soul
force, it enables you to look back from the observation of
awakening to that what one may call: entering into the
physical-sensory world. About that, I want to speak more
exactly in the third talk.
You
learn from this fact that modern spiritual-scientific
psychology is based on real observation that, however, it does
not cause this observation with those observations that you
already have, but with those concepts, which you have to form
first. Besides, the important thing is just to acknowledge that
we have pictorial existence in the imagining only and that the
imagining must accept this pictorial character because the
bodily life cannot directly accept the reality of the
mental.
You
learn to recognise that in the imagining the pictures of the
whole antenatal spiritual-mental life take place, as well as at
the moment of awakening the contents of thoughts appear to the
soul which we have experienced from falling asleep until
awakening. If we continue the observations methodically, the
spiritual-mental experience appears independently which has
combined with the bodily at the entry of the human being into
this bodily life. There is on one side just a straight progress
from the understanding of the moment of awakening to imagining.
On the other side, you thereby get the ability to proceed from
observing the awakening to the entry of the human being in the
earthly life.
Of
course, the modern human being says that he cannot realise
those things that he cannot imagine them. — However, this
is why it concerns just that you cannot familiarise yourself
with these things with the usual imagining. This is the first
great discovery that you have. You can observe the
spiritual-mental life before birth or conception only if you
appropriate other forces than those are which you already
have.
You
can recognise only by such a way, as I have indicated it, that
the imagining is rooted in the spiritual. On the other side,
this way also enables you to delve into the will. The will must
be developed by self-discipline to another level than it has in
the usual life. However, thereby something else comes about
than by that which I have described up to now. Up to now, I
have described the way to the mental pictures that extended the
view beyond birth or conception, which leads on the other hand
into the unreal of the imagining life. We get the certainty of
the independence of that which reveals itself in imagining in
the suggested way.
The
matter becomes different if we more exactly get to know the
will by self-discipline. In the meditative imagining, we make
ourselves independent of the physical body. We notice this
independence by the fact that the night thoughts, which the
body cannot accept, transition into the consciousness that you
behold how you emerge from a sea of thoughts.
Because you take charge of the will discipline, you feel more
and more depending on the body. You get more and more into the
body. You get to that which the outer science can never reach.
It can only externally investigate the appearance of the
inside, while it goes forward anatomical-physiologically. In
internal way, you learn to recognise what goes forward,
actually, in the body if anyhow a will impulse gains ground. It
sounds extremely weird, but you get to know this bodily life in
the will in such a way that you have the same experiences,
which you, otherwise, only know possibly with hunger and
thirst, with immediate feelings that are connected with the
bodily activity.
Whereas the picture of imagining makes us more and more
independent from the bodily life, the cultivation of the will
induces you to experience the will really in such a way as you
experience hunger and thirst. You get to the most significant
feelings associated with the bodily life.
In
particular, you learn to recognise how the thought that
transitions in the will impulse cannot help expressing itself
as something emotional with that who has developed the will as
the inside expresses itself if you are hungry. As paradoxical
it sounds: you experience a will thought with developed will by
a feeling of hunger or thirst; you may call it as you want.
It
concerns of realising the big difference between the
development of the imagining life that makes us more and more
independent from the nature of the bodily life, and the
development of the will life that shows us, how we are
connected in the usual existence just by the will with our
bodily life.
But
it also becomes obvious if this observation of the will really
becomes internal experience like hunger and thirst that in this
will something is that proves every time when a will impulse is
grasped to be very similar to the moment of falling asleep. Now
you learn also to recognise the secret of falling asleep, this
peculiar transition to the unaware state. This is parallel for
the observation with letting an impulse of thought in the will.
The will decision which one grasps proves to be a kind of
falling asleep that is started and not finished.
Now
you get to know the opposite of that which you got to know with
the development of imagining. With imagining, you find out that
the spiritual-mental that you experience from falling asleep
until awakening is not able to enter. That spiritual-mental
which expresses itself in the will cannot leave the body with
the usual waking state; it is stopped. This stopping expresses
itself as the will power. If the body no longer keeps it, the
moment of falling asleep occurs.
This will be the other starting point for the modern
psychology: to find the coherence of will and falling asleep,
of the inability to retain the spiritual-mental which then
unites with the general universe by the human body, and falling
asleep, as we have found the coherence of forming of mental
pictures and the awakening in other way.
If
you learn to recognise how falling asleep is intimately related
to every will impulse, you get by the line which one has drawn
in research between falling asleep and willing the internal
mental force to continue the line to the other side. Because
you have investigated the imagining, you got the possibility to
look at the mental-spiritual beyond birth or conception. Thus
you can investigate the other line in the oppose direction. You
pursue the line of falling asleep up to the will. You find the
relationship of the will impulse with falling asleep. Then you
pursue the soul life after falling asleep with the inner power
that you have thereby appropriated, and then the other side of
the human existence, death, appears. Since then the intimate
relationship of the will with death appears.
Natural sciences will make this important discovery in not too
distant future; they will prove that what spiritual science has
to ascertain from the other side. Since natural sciences will
show that everything that is associated with the will impulses
is associated with the formation of certain poisons, with
everything that leads the human being into the same direction
in which he is led if he walks towards death.
Those forces that enable the human being to unfold his will
impulse are heading to death. How are they heading to death? If
the imagining is a bare picture of its true reality, the will
is something embryonic. We can will because we can keep a
certain force in an embryonic condition.
If
you imagine the seed of a plant and then the whole plant, you
have the picture that you can apply to what spiritual research
shows with reference to the will. Since the will is an
embryonic death. Even as we awake perpetually, we are born
perpetually if we think; we die perpetually if we activate our
will. The force of death is in us, we lower it by the nature of
our bodily life, we dismiss it for a short time while falling
asleep, and the body can recover again. However, the force that
we carry in us because we can unfold will impulses is the
embryo of that force with which the soul walks through the gate
of death.
Thus, the big boundary questions of life join the most usual
mental pictures of imagining and willing. We look beyond the
bodily life if we learn to understand imagining and willing.
Imagining, feeling and willing have become empty phrases
— about other concepts I speak in the following talk
— because one does not get around to applying the real
way of thinking of natural sciences, the way of observation, to
the soul life.
About other things, I have to speak in the third talk. However,
such mental pictures arise, which show that the feeling is a
result of the whole life between birth and death, which show
that imagining is a result of the life beyond birth or
conception, which show that the will is the embryonic of that
which we carry beyond death.
One
gets to no real concept of imagining, feeling and willing if
one does not start considering the whole life in such a way as
I have described it today by which one gets beyond awakening
and falling asleep to birth and death. However, I have to say
that that thinking which is necessary to familiarise yourself
with these things must have the courage to break with many
things.
However, do not believe that someone who has come to such
things which must rightly seem to be paradoxical, maybe
foolish, to the human being of the present, especially to the
scientist of the present, has not taken the matter seriously,
if he experienced everything that the others also know who
doubt it. Disproving this thing is easy.
I
have attempted once in Prague with two public talks to disprove
spiritual science at first and then to found it. Of course,
disproving is much easier than founding. However, something
else is much more significant. One would have to say to
himself, actually, in particular in view of some things that
have taken place in the very last time: spiritual science must
retrain concerning many things, and not few people have forced
themselves to retrain the one or the other in the last time.
Must the outer compulsion induce people to retrain? Indeed,
many people will retrain repeatedly by outer compulsion.
However, it is a time today where it is necessary to practise a
kind of self-reflection, which makes you realise that that
which originates from scientific or other present mental
pictures leads into the unreal in the soul. Only such an
investigating of the soul forces as I have described it today
can lead into the soul. You can get around to attaining that
strength for this research from yourself only. On the other
hand, just modern natural sciences will automatically lead
somebody to spiritual science who understands the essence of
natural sciences. Tomorrow I would just like to show this.
The
spiritual-scientific psychology leads from the temporal of the
human being to the everlasting of his soul. It will show that
in future if people do not force themselves to walk on the
intimated way no psychology will be there or only such a
psychology that gives useless food to the soul. Energy and
courage belong to this new psychology. Our time already points
to the fact that now the treasures of the human inside cannot
be won — while it puts the human being in an outer
existence to which one will need some courage — by mere
letting himself go but only by courageous advancing with such
methods, which one has to search, which did not already
exist.
|